Trauma and Recovery: New Challenges to Motherhood in Contemporary Literature and Culture

Abstract

Trauma and Recovery: New Challenges to Motherhood in Contemporary Literature and Culture presents a multidisciplinary framework for those interested in representations of mothering/motherhood in literature, film, and theater. Laura Lazzari and Nathalie Ségeral have gathered scholars “from a wide range of geographical areas and fields: social sciences, modern languages, literature, creative writing, journalism, media studies, medicine, and biology” (2), which speaks to the expansion of motherhood studies in the last decade or so. The chapters all share the interpretive framework of trauma theory, more specifically “the traumatic affects that can be linked to conception, pregnancy, and birth” (3). The geographical diversity represented in this cross-cultural group of scholars defies facile notions of universal experiences of conception, pregnancy, and birth. The collection also speaks to the changing political and medical landscape of the first decades of the 21st century. As Lazzari and Ségeral note in their introduction, their collection appears against the backdrop of recent debates in France “around the legalization of medically assisted procreation for single and lesbian women” (2), and in Italy in response to a pro-fertility campaign there, among other shifts in public discourse and reproductive policies. In the wake of the US Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, evacuating the Constitutional right to abortion, there is a heightened significance to critiques of contemporary representations of motherhood.