Bad Moms: Ideologies of Maternal Selfhood in 20/21st Century Media

Catalog description

In this course we will attend to media--including films, advertising, TV, digital, and literature - that help to constitute, perpetuate, and challenge normative scripts of what constitutes good mothering. This seminar asks students to critically analyze the varied factors that shape and define contemporary motherhood as an embodied ideology, both in the U.S. and across the globe. And we will investigate how good mothers are centrally linked to the imagination of a healthy and civilized nation. Our seminar’s key themes include the institutionalization of motherhood, motherhood as subjectivity, agency and performance, technologies of reproduction, narratives of adoption, and the politicization of motherhood, and the perpetual return to good motherhood as an ideal.