Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (JMI - York University)
Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (JMI - York University)Not a member yet
1824 research outputs found
Sort by
Mothering Performativity in Buchi Emecheta’s "The Joys of Motherhood"
Full text linkIn the novel The Joys of Motherhood, author Buchi Emecheta demonstrates how motherhood emerges from a patriarchal society characterized by a homogeneous system of oppression. Motherhood is closely intertwined with gender, where women’s roles are often determined by traditional hierarchical norms. In Nigeria’s Igbo culture, a woman is not only restricted to male dominance and domestic space but also to coercive mechanisms, such as polygamy, son preference, and widow inheritance. Although all are subjected to the same cultural and gendered background, the novel introduces the reader to Ona, Nnu Ego, and Adaku, women who develop their identities differently. Sometimes, these fictional characters follow the traditional Igbo views on womanhood, and other times, they subvert them by providing a new performative model. Applying Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity to Nigeria’s Igbo culture, this article argues that mothering performativity is a way of (de)constructing traditional Igbo views of womanhood. Using the method of a critical textual analysis of The Joys of Motherhood, I examine how the characters Nnu Ego, Ona, and Adaku internalize or subvert cultural tradition by liberating themselves from gender expectation. Butler’s framework explains the possibilities of subversion and displacement within the dominant structure. Moreover, the power of performativity is articulated with the ideology of mothering in which mothers exercise agency by determining their routes through life. In contrast to the apolitical and oppressive institution of motherhood, mothering performativity transforms women’s daily practices into a source of power. 
Maternal Legacies: Reflections on the Life and Work of Dr. Marie Porter, AM
Full text linkThis article honours the life and scholarly contributions of Dr. Marie Porter AM (1938–2023), a transformative figure in motherhood studies whose work bridged lived maternal experience and academic theory. Drawing on her journey of mothering three sons, including one with severe physical disabilities, Marie developed the concept of “transformative power in motherwork,” which theorizes how mothers develop agency and adaptability through their maternal practice. Through analysis of Marie’s published works, particularly her groundbreaking text Transformative Power in Motherwork (2008), and unpublished manuscripts and speeches, we explore how her scholarship emerged from and was deeply informed by her mothering lived experiences. The article examines Marie’s key theoretical contributions, including her development of concepts like “incipient agency,” and her analysis of how mothers resist dominant master narratives of motherhood. As a mother and scholar who helped establish motherhood studies in Australia, Marie’s work demonstrates how mothers develop diverse agentic skills even within constraining institutional contexts. We argue that Marie’s scholarly legacy offers vital insights for contemporary maternal scholarship by emphasizing mothers’ capacity for resistance and transformation. Written by three scholars who worked closely with Marie, this article weaves together academic analysis with personal reflections to capture the enduring impact of her work on motherhood studies and the lives of those she mentored
Mother Is a Gendered Verb: Embodied Acts of Care in Memoirs of Queer Family
Full text linkThis article rethinks the particularity of the term “mother” within the converging contexts of the recent push towards trans-inclusive language, such as “birthing person,” as well as the crisis of caregiving that came to the fore within the coronavirus pandemic. To do so, this article analyzes Krys Malcolm Belc’s recent book The Natural Mother of the Child (2021), which was published amid discussion in mainstream media of inclusive terminology for birth and nursing. Belc’s book uses his own experience of gestational parenthood to offer a corrective and counternarrative to essentialist notions of motherhood that operate both in cultural discussions of pregnancy and in legal documents, including birth certificates. Juxtaposed with this analysis of Belc, this article considers the equally problematic ungendering of the term “mother,” a move that fails to consider the specific embodied and intersectional contexts in which carework occurs. Ultimately, it is within mother memoirs by queer writers that we can understand ways that individual parents understand and narrate their experiences of essential labour; telling stories of queer families, in all their book-length complexity, helps write new family stories, ones that will hopefully lead to real and lasting social change
Motherblame-Stigma and Institutional Gaslighting: Obscuring Failures in Child Disability Care Infrastructures
Full text linkMothers of children with mental illness are on the frontlines of two global crises. The rates and severity of children’s mental illness have been rapidly growing, increasing the need for services and community supports. At the same time, four decades of privatization and austerity have resulted in what Emma Dowling calls “the care crisis,” including a state of disarray in the children’s mental health service sector. The intersection of the children’s mental health crisis with the care crisis makes it impossible for many children to access hospital beds for mental health emergencies and community-based disability services necessary to keep them alive and in their own homes. Mothers overwhelmingly bear the economic and social burdens of filling in disability service gaps. Furthermore, the very agencies charged to serve children with disabilities depend on the exploited and appropriated unpaid labour of their mothers. This article introduces the concept of “motherblame-stigma,” a social prejudice in the form of social disgrace, blame, and distrust of mothers related to a stigmatized characteristic of their child. After tracing the history of motherblame-stigma for children’s mental illness, I apply an epistemic oppression framing to illustrate how motherblame-stigma functions to prevent mothers from correcting distorted public narratives about child disability service infrastructures (a contributory injustice) and to sow self-doubt within mothers about their own experiences and capabilities (gaslighting). I provide examples of institutional gaslighting in state policy, law, public statements, and narratives to blame mothers for failing to seek and navigate services that do not exist
Echoes in the Water: La Llorona, Folklore, and the Sacred Geography of Maternal Grief
Full text linkThis article examines La Llorona as a figure rooted in pre-Columbian mythology and reshaped through the colonial encounter, positioning her at the intersection of motherhood, grief, and environmental memory. Emerging from associations with Cihuacoatl, the Aztec goddess of fertility and childbirth, and tied to the sacred geographies of Tenochtitlan’s lakes and rivers, La Llorona embodies both Indigenous cosmologies and the ruptures of conquest. Her cry—“¡Ay, mis hijos!” (“Oh, my children!”)—functions as a sonic archive and preserves cultural memory while resisting erasure and echoing through literal and symbolic waters as lament and warning. This study also situates La Llorona alongside Ophelia in Hamlet and Imoinda in Oroonoko to trace how female and maternal bodies become symbolic sites of loss across time, space, and empire. Water emerges not merely as backdrop but as sacred and political terrain—both generative and destructive—that anchors cultural identity, ecological reverence, and histories of dispossession. Through oral tradition, visual representation, and embodied geography, La Llorona operates as a living archive of Indigenous resilience, carrying forward intertwined legacies of creation, destruction, and survival. By reading La Llorona through a transhistorical and transgeographical lens, this article illuminates how her legend functions as both cultural memory and an act of resistance, adapting to shifting historical contexts while retaining her power as a figure of mourning, warning, and defiance. In doing so, it invites a reconsideration of folklore as an active terrain where environment, body, and story continually reshape one another
“All the Good Roles”: A Narrative of Motherhood through Artifacts
Full text linkTo mother is to navigate competing impulses, to hold on and to let go, knowing all the while the impossibility of each urge. In this lyric essay, I explore the ambivalence of motherhood, the tension of a mother’s desire to both preserve and destroy, through artifacts, both mine and my mother’s. I take up my sons’ baby teeth, their empty baby books, and the objects lost to my mother’s dirt floor crawl space, the black mould, the bowing walls, all as a way of excavating both my and my mother’s dreams of our creative lives before and during our lives as mothers. There is the caustic smell of Bic Wite-Out beside my mother’s typewriter and, decades later, the three unworn wedding rings in my jewelry cabinet, all dormant objects that still buzz with longing. Ultimately, I do not seek in this essay to reconcile these competing impulses but to illuminate the complexity of a mother’s desires for herself and her children, oftentimes at odds, and what we choose to keep and abandon in our stories as mothers
(In)Visible Boxes: Racialized Intersubjectivity and Transracial Mothering in Senna’s Caucasia
Full text linkDanzy Senna explores the challenges of racialized intersubjectivity in transracial mothering in her 1998 novel Caucasia. Transracial mothering pertains to mothers who possess a different racial identity from that of their children, most often in mixed-race families. The literature on mixed-race identity and experience is notably limited, particularly concerning motherhood in mixed-race settings. This article addresses this gap and explores racialized intersubjectivity in mother-daughter relationships by analyzing motherhood in Danzy Senna’s novel Caucasia. Racialized intersubjectivity describes how racial differences affect the interchange of thoughts and feelings, both conscious and unconscious, that provide a shared perception of reality between two or more persons. This paper builds upon the literature regarding the effect of race on maternal competence by looking further into racial dynamics in mixed-race families. A careful analysis of the text demonstrates how racial differences between mothers and daughters inherently impact their intersubjectivity, thus complicating their reality
