CfP: Museum of Motherhood

St. Petersburg, Florida & Online. March 24-26, 2023 

REPRODUCTIVE LANDSCAPES- Undoing m/otherhood; who has the right to talk about motherhood, who claims that status, and how do we create words, art, and scholarship moving forward?

Calling all scholars, sociologists, maternal psychologists, philosophers, anthropologists, women’s, sexuality, and gender professors, masculinity studies experts, birth-workers, doctors, motherhood and fatherhood researchers, artists, students, and performers: This conference call is for papers, performances, conversations, and art, focused on new gender identities and discourse. Included in this call is an invitation to explore political policy positions relative to Roe vs. Wade, psychological manifestations of maternal neonaticide, infanticide, and filicide, as well as the naming and rewriting of works, art, and scholarship around mothers, mothering, and motherhood. How do we approach this? Who gets to say what? How do we make visible these topics in mainstream articulations? How are those with (dis)abilities and other marginalized positionalities heard and made visible? In what ways does inclusivity threaten the status quo? How can we complicate binary viewpoints and assertions situated in a fear-based cultural reality? We rely on previous scholarship, now framed within the context of changing times. What now will we make of ourselves together and separately? We are, after all, the future!

We encourage presenters to unpack the sociocultural domain and the medicalized environment within which these debates are often situated as we embrace and analyze meaning-making, in the area of maternal health, identity, experience, and wellbeing. What is good for whom and how does that impact everyone else?

We intend the conference to serve as a site of resistance as we deconstruct, reframe, and affirm the complex landscape of embodied mother-work, pregnancy, birth, identity, care-work, and the ongoing labor and experience of those within family systems everywhere. We recognize the scale, variance, and duration of these passionate debates and hope to support and empower those who need support the most.


Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
  • Intersectional identities
  • Normative constructions of gender in motherwork, pregnancy and birthing
  • Biomedical and cultural discourses of motherwork, pregnancy, and birth, including issues related to marginalized
  • identities, fertility treatment, gender identity, and intersex identities
  • Motherwork, pregnancy and birthing with (dis-)abilities, illness, and children with special needs
  • Child and maternal psychology interventions, alternative therapies, and results
  • Breastfeeding ambivalence, obstacles, and outcomes
  • Future wombs, including transplants, artificial constructions, cloning, and surrogacy
  • Art as healing and activism as visible resistance
  • Embodied resistance to socially constructed prescriptions and conventions about motherwork, pregnancy, and birth, including as they are contextualized within marginalized positionalities


CONFERENCE: The Annual Academic MoM Conference is in person and online in 2023. We welcome individuals and roundtables conducting research, making art, working in therapudic, medical, university, and birth settings, as well as autoethnograpic perspectives by mothers, family members & students.

JOURNAL OF MOTHER STUDIES (JourMS): All submissions for the 2023 conference should consider submitting to the Journal of Mother Studies, an academic, peer-reviewed, hybrid digital humanities journal devoted to Mother Studies published annually. Works may also be submitted for the conference only.

FOR ALL SUBMISSIONS: Abstracts must include a title and bio. Abstracts must be submitted by Nov 30 (midnight). Notifications sent Dec. 15 and early bird registration begins $165. Regular Registration starts Jan 15th $180 and closes Feb 15th. Full submissions for the conference are due March 1st, (after acceptance to the conference). Full submissions for the Journal are due by May 30th (midnight). These include other submission types (e.g. performance, media, music). Go to https://jourms.org/submit/ 

URL: https://jourms.org/submit/