The presentation will focus on the ways three family generations discuss and interpret their mothers‘ experiences of difficult past periods, including deportations, partisan war, collectivization and encounters with the security structures. The empirical data for an interpretive analysis come from 16 Lithuanian family conversations about the soviet past. Grandparents and parents share their memories whereas grandchildren – generation after a transformative change ­– is asked to re-narrate their grandparents‘ life stories. The ways different family generations portray their mothers and grandmothers‘ experiences and interpret their role in difficult past periods add to our knowledge on interaction between the state- and family level memory. Furthermore, the ways they make sense of the mother‘s role (including mothers themselves) in harsh historical circumstances add to understanding of the current interpretive framework that applies to gender roles in general.

Breastfeeding on screen is a rare matter. The avoidance of this mundane act of motherhood finds parallel in the Catholic iconography from the 16^th century onwards. The nursing Madonna, Madonna lactans in the Latin tradition or Galaktotrophousa in the Orthodox one, refers to a pictorial representation that emerged in the early 14th century, depicting the Virgin Mary nursing the infant Christ. This iconography represented a regular part of maternity and was therefore used in both public and private worship. Images of the Virgin Mary nursing the infant Christ were considered the most popular type of Marian iconography during the Renaissance. At least one hundred and fifty-three images of this iconography were produced in Italy alone in the 14th and 15th centuries. Images of the nursing Madonna were also popular throughout Europe. In the 16th century, however, this pictorial tradition was abandoned. The political, religious and social conflicts of the century forced radical changes in Christian iconography, and in particular in the iconographic type of the nursing Madonna. This subversion was so profound that by the end of the 16th century she was considered lascivious and unfit for pious devotion. Drawing on sixteenth-century theoretical works, iconographic analysis, and the theoretical shift in Catholic iconography that particularly exhorted the avoidance of the nursing Madonna iconographic type, this paper questions why images of breastfeeding are still avoided in modern media.

A long-established discourse of being a mother as intrinsic to the definition of fulfilled womanhood often leads to the perceptions of non-maternal femininities as abnormal, failed, and/or monstrous (Bell 2019; Björklund 2023; de Boer 2019). While research shows that women may perceive motherhood as tied to the “fundamental losses of identity,” and attach positive values to being childfree (Myers 2017, 796), popular culture often contributes to the stigmatizing image of non-mothers as cold-hearted, unfulfilled, expendable, and/or traumatised (Archetti 2019; Stasiewicz-Bieńkowska 2013).

This project explores the representations of childless and childfree women in contemporary fantasy fiction. As a driving force behind enchanted love bonds or a price for acquiring extraordinary powers, female fertility is a recurrent trope in the fantasy, with maternal identity and reproductive body occasionally narrated as fundamental for a happy ending. This presentation focuses on the transmedial storyworld of The Witcher, originating from the literary series by Andrzej Sapkowski. Featuring an array of heroines who do not have children, and brimming with the narratives of female reproductive challenges and choices, The Witcher engages on multiple levels with the ongoing conversations on non/motherhood. This presentation will primarily examine the characters of Yennefer and Milva—an infertile enchantress desiring to be a mother and a warrioress who sees childbearing as a loss; their storylines speaking to the synergies of non/motherhood, body, agency, and the cultural negotiations of the gendered self.

The image of Mother Ireland, where the landscape of Ireland is imagined as a reproductive female, is deeply enmeshed in the conceptualisation of the maternal care in Ireland, where the primary domestic caregiver has been idealised as a desexualised, self-sacrificing woman. In this paper I discuss how "Mother Ireland" is being subverted, as its failures in representing motherhood become apparent through art. In Inis t’Oirr: Aran Dance (1985), feminist artist Pauline Cummins reimagines Mother Ireland through expressions of non-reproductive maternal sexual desire. More recently, discomfort around sexual reproduction has resulted in more devastating consequences through the 2018 “CervicalCheck Scandal,” as medical doctors failed to inform hundreds of women of false negative cervical smear tests, resulting in 208 women developing cervical cancer. Laura O’Connor's art works responding to this scandal present the female body as fragmented into the Irish landscape, in response to the “whole-system failure” of Irish gynaecological care. Finally, I consider the short play “Dear Ireland, you’ll hardly notice my absence” (2020) by Rosaleen McDonagh, which presents the exclusions that Traveller mothers face in Ireland, as Ireland’s ethnic minority. In this analysis, I discuss the subversion of maternal stereotypes in Ireland while arguing that the persistence of convention has caused denial and avoidance in order to uphold impossible idealizations of motherhood, resulting in systemic failures of care. Such an approach emphasizes how mothering is a collective and not individual endeavour, as these alternative representations create other ways for thinking of maternal caregiving within the Irish context.