Mediated Moms: Contemporary Challenges to the Motherhood Myth

«The essays in this volume enrich and elucidate the complexities and contradictory tensions of motherhood, and the representations of it in this contemporary moment. The contributors to this book demonstrate that motherhood is neither inimical nor antithetical to possibilities for transgression. Rather, motherhood as an ideological construction is a multidimensional, paradoxical site of contestation and struggle. Contributors to this book demonstrate that cautious optimism is warranted about the potentially liberatory possibilities of mediated transgressive mothering.»
Susan Owen, Distinguished Professor of Communication Studies, University of Puget Sound)

«Heather L. Hundley and Sara E. Hayden have done a superb job bringing together a set of essays that analyze and enlarge our understanding of the motherhood myth. As a result, Mediated Moms provides a more complex understanding of how the institution of motherhood is and continues to be culturally constructed, while contributors provide insightful analyses that move beyond the good-bad mothering binary to reveal how the mediated mothers explored sometimes defy, challenge, talk back to, and/or negotiate institutionalized motherhood. Thus, this book is a must-read for any scholar interested in learning how and why we should all appreciate the important roles ‘bad’ mothers play in the always-evolving institution of motherhood.»
(D. Lynn O’Brien Hallstein, Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Boston University)

«The essays in this volume enrich and elucidate the complexities and contradictory tensions of motherhood, and the representations of it in this contemporary moment. The contributors to this book demonstrate that motherhood is neither inimical nor antithetical to possibilities for transgression. Rather, motherhood as an ideological construction is a multidimensional, paradoxical site of contestation and struggle. Contributors to this book demonstrate that cautious optimism is warranted about the potentially liberatory possibilities of mediated transgressive mothering.»
Susan Owen, Distinguished Professor of Communication Studies, University of Puget Sound)
«Heather L. Hundley and Sara E. Hayden have done a superb job bringing together a set of essays that analyze and enlarge our understanding of the motherhood myth. As a result, Mediated Moms provides a more complex understanding of how the institution of motherhood is and continues to be culturally constructed, while contributors provide insightful analyses that move beyond the good-bad mothering binary to reveal how the mediated mothers explored sometimes defy, challenge, talk back to, and/or negotiate institutionalized motherhood. Thus, this book is a must-read for any scholar interested in learning how and why we should all appreciate the important roles ‘bad’ mothers play in the always-evolving institution of motherhood.»
(D. Lynn O’Brien Hallstein, Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Boston University)