Troubling Motherhood

"In global politics, women's bodies are policed, objectified, surveilled, and feared, with particular attention paid to both their met or unmet procreative potential. By illuminating and interrogating representations and narratives of maternity, this volume shows how practices of global politics shape and are shaped by the gendered norms and institutions that underpin motherhood. The guiding theoretical idea in this volume is that motherhood matters in global politics. However - as with so many political phenomena coded 'female' in the binary cognitive architectures of the West - the diverse ways in which performances and practices of motherhood are constituted by and are constitutive of other dimensions of political life they are frequently obscured or assumed to be of little interest to scholars, policy makers, and practitioners. Featuring innovative and diverse interrogations of the politics of motherhood as an institution, this collection shows that maternality is troubled, complicated, and heterogeneous in global politics and thus performances and practices of motherhood warrant closer and more sustained scrutiny"--