Helena Wahlström Henriksson

Anna Williams

Margaretha Fahlgren

This open access volume offers original essays on how motherhood and mothering are represented in contemporary fiction and life writing across several national contexts. Providing a broad range of perspectives in terms of geopolitical places, thematic concerns, and theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches, it demonstrates the significance of literary narratives for understanding and critiquing motherhood and mothering as social phenomena and subjective experiences. The chapters contextualize motherhood and mothering in terms of their particular national and cultural location and analyze narratives about mothers who are firmly placed in one national context, as well as those who are in “in-between” positions due to migrant experiences. The contributions foreground and link together the themes central to the volume: embodied experience and maternal embodiment; notions of what is “normal” or natural (or not) about motherhood; maternal health and illness; mother-daughter relations; maternality and memory; and the (im)possibilities of giving voice to the mother. They raise questions about how motherhood and mothering are marked by absence and/or presence, as well as by profound ambivalences.

Narratives of Motherhood and Mothering in Fiction and Life Writing

Jacob Bull

This volume offers some of the outputs, challenges and opportunities created in an interdisciplinary programme that was set up to engage multi-, inter- and transdisciplinary perspectives on issues at the intersections of nature and culture, sex and gender. When working with mass spectrometers, microscopes, discourse analysis or interviews, one rarely has to explain them to colleagues. They are the tools used. But when working in inter- or transdisciplinary settings, such tools require explanations. These conversations make evident that trans and interdisciplinary (gender) research is a not just a novelty requiring an adjectival prefix ‘trans-‘ or ‘inter-’, it is something done, performed, practiced. Moreover it is something done in particular spaces, a consequence of particular meetings – transgressive encounters. This collection is built on work conducted under the GenNa: Nature/Culture and Transgressive Encounters Research Programme, funded by the Swedish research council. It brings together a range of scholars from the humanities, natural, physical, life, and social sciences by so doing it reflects on the challenges, risks and opportunities of doing trans- and interdisciplinary work. The result is a collection that uses a multitude of tools to examine issues such as sexual difference, hydro power exploitation, research seminars, dairy farming, the spaces between molecules, film and identity. They are witness to the diversity created through transgressive encounters and illustrations of doing inter- and transdisciplinary research.

Margaretha Fahlgren

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