Representations of Motherhood

Abstract

Motherhood is the subject of considerable discussion and review. We are all, as Rich has famously said, ‘of woman born’ (1977), and this is still the case at the current stage of technological development, although it may not be for ever. Yet, motherhood is subject both to assumptions that it is an identity that can be taken for granted — it is ‘natural’ so requires no further interrogation — and to a plethora of critiques through which meanings about what it means to be a mother are constructed. This chapter uses approaches that have been developed within cultural studies to look at the politics of representation and addresses some of the ways in which motherhood is represented, for example through discourses in popular culture.