ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the concept of the ‘postmaternal’ as a critique of and response to changing cultural, political and economic conditions for mothering and motherhood. It explains important conceptual questions about the relationship between contemporary feminism and maternity which had been hitherto ignored in contemporary maternal scholarship. In Confronting Postmaternal Thinking: Feminism, Memory, Care Julie Stephens identifies a significant cultural anxiety about care-giving, nurturing and human dependency she calls ‘postmaternal’ thinking, based on analysis of offline and online cultural texts and oral histories about maternal experiences. The book shows that the process of remembering and memorialising the maternal in feminist scholarship needs to reflect its central location in diverse bodies of feminist scholarship and make visible its legacies in the analyses of black feminism, socialist feminism and ecofeminism beyond that of Sara Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking.
