About Reading Motherhood

Welcome! I am a feminist scholar of literary/cultural studies at Georgetown University whose research and teaching encompass the fields of Feminist Studies, Working-Class Studies, Critical Race Studies, Motherhood Studies, Adoption Studies, and Popular Music Studies. I grew up amidst the steel mills and oil refineries of Upper Northwest Indiana and was a first generation college student.  That history informs much of the work that I do.

 

My ‘mother’ identity:  I didn’t want to have children until my later thirties, and after a brief and demoralizing whirl with low-level reproductive therapy, I and my husband decided, after considerable research, to adopt a baby from China during the heyday of transnational adoptions (late 1990s).  That daughter is now 22, and the three of us over the years have explored the complexities of adoption as a family-making opportunity as well as an exploitative practice. She is now making her own contribution by organizing adoptee support groups and events.   I’m fortunate to have this chosen family who provide daily love, laughter, and community.  Our twelve-year-old dog Jackie is still as neurotic as ever in her advanced years but keeps us highly amused.

 

If you’d like to see some of my writing, here are book titles and links:

 

• Natural Acts: Gender, Race, and Rusticity in Country Music (https://www.press.umich.edu/277898/natural_acts)

 

• Old Roots, New Routes: The Cultural Politics of Alt.Country Music, co-edited with Barbara Ching (https://www.press.umich.edu/344030/old_roots_new_routes)

 

• Class Fictions:  Shame and Resistance in the British Working-Class Novel, 1890-1945 (https://www.dukeupress.edu/class-fictions)

I think of myself as a writer, journalist, feminist and occasional poet—but primarily   I describe myself as a teacher.  I have been at Georgetown for more than thirty years, serving as the academic director of the Community Scholars Program

(an academic program focused on critical writing and reading for first-generation

students).  As the head instructor in that program for many years, teaching writing

was my primary academic interest.  I also teach (and am passionate about)

motherhood studies, feminist theory, sixties cultural history, and poetry.

I have co-written and edited four volumes of poetry as “literary therapy.”

  

When my publisher asked me for a bio for my first book, it seemed important to

include only my work and professional life.  As a woman, I did not want to talk about being a mother—only very recently have male authors begun to include the fact that they have x number of children, whom they adore, in their bios. I am so relieved and delighted to talk briefly about my life as a mother on this site.  I have two sons, 37 and 49. (The age gap is explained by the epiphany I had when my oldest was born—I could not have another child until I understood and began my work in the world.)

 

Raising feminist sons was my goal in addition to all of the other work that goes into mothering.  My husband is Chicano (self-described), so that meant raising feminist boys of color.  I also have two grandsons (Jewish, Mexican, Russian, Polish, British, Irish, German, and Swedish).  They have relatives who died in the Holocaust and they study pre-Columbian history.  All of us want them to learn that survival itself can be a privilege and that gender is never destiny.

 

We are delighted to welcome you to this site and offer both past and present cultural and literary standpoints on motherhood. We hope that you will share your

own experiences and points of view as well.

 

If you’d like to take a look at my latest book, you can see it here.

 

https://www.amazon.com/How-Did-This-Happen-Anymore/dp/1455567000

 

And a brief description:

"This is the book I didn't even know I needed-until I found myself crying within the first few pages. 'Growing up' and 'growing older' can feel lonely-thinking no one else feels the same way or experiences the same losses and hopes and fears. In these poems, and in the hilarious, touching commentary accompanying them, I found solace and joy. How Did This Happen is not your mother's anthology. It is a fierce, funny, guided meditation, set in poetry, through the insult, grit and grace of aging; a thinking woman's guide to growing older. This is a book to love, now and for the months and years to come."―Andrea Seabrook, NPR

Hello! I am a junior at Georgetown majoring in Government and English with a minor in Spanish. Taking Prof. Fox and Prof. Velez’s course in Spring of 2022 opened my eyes to the many ways in which motherhood is a societal institution as much as it is a personal undertaking. In my studies, I have always been interested in intersectionality and how an individual's competing identities can affect their day-to-day life. With that in mind, Reading Motherhood was the perfect course to examine how factors such as race, class, and sexual orientation interact with each other to profoundly impact the lives of mothers all around the world. 

 

I am excited to continue exploring the intricacies of motherhood as current webmaster and contributor on the site!