Introduction to the Inaugural issue of JourMS

Kandee Kosior & Rosiland Howell

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Welcome to the inaugural issue of the Journal of Mother Studies. We are delighted to share with you this anthology of papers from an international selection of scholars, artists, researchers and practitioners, all committed to the exploration and expansion of the field of Mother Studies.

In 1976 Adrienne Rich first articulated the necessity to resist conflating the individual, subjective experiences of individual women’s relationship to their potential reproductivity with the Institution of Motherhood as created and shored up by our western society. Forty years later the Journal of Mother Studies offers a vital scholarly contribution in further refining, defining, sifting, and drilling down into those socio-cultural, economic, political, psychological and subjective realities that impact upon our assumptions and presumptions on Motherhood, the act of Mothering. and the experiences of individual Mothers.

The journal uniquely aims to bring together research and reflection from diverse disciplines including but not limited to, literary criticism, psychology, critical theory, art practice and the social sciences so that we may show up the places where our cultural understanding of m/otherness falters or challenges us. By setting different disciplines alongside each other in the form of a single coherent journal we hope to make links, and find the points of tension between them and ultimately fill some of the mother-shaped holes in our cultural understanding.

The Journal of Mother Studies welcomes your thoughts, comments, and submissions.

Warmly,

Kandee Kosior and Rosalind Howell

Editors

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