Overview
What does it mean to be a mother in the 21st century? This course explores how motherhood is constructed, regulated, and idealized across popular culture, policy, and lived experience. A clear distinction is made between mothering as a construct that informs personal identity and motherhood as a role determined and shaped by gendered, social, economic, and cultural structures. As you navigate the course content, you will examine dominant cultural scripts of “good” versus “bad” mothers and interrogate who is recognized as “mother”; whose labour is valued; and how race, sexuality, gender, class, dis/ability, and government policy shape maternal representation.
Throughout the course, you will engage critical feminist and intersectional frameworks, analyze contemporary and historical texts, and reflect on how maternal narratives circulate power. By way of critical media analysis, theoretical engagement, and reflective work, you will be equipped to question assumptions about motherhood that are taken for granted and imagine more expansive possibilities for care, kinship, and belonging.
Outline
WGST 423 consists of seven units:
Unit 1: The Sociocultural Study of Motherhood
Unit 2: Motherhood and Media: Narratives in Popular Culture
Unit 3: The Economics of Mothering: Work, Labour, and Government Policy
Unit 4: Reproductive Justice and the Right to Mother
Unit 5: Queer, Trans, and Chosen-Family Parenting
Unit 6: Mental Health, Disability, and the Neurodivergent Mother
Unit 7: The Future of Mothering
Learning outcomes
WGST 423 has seven major learning outcomes. After completing this course, students should be able to:
- Critically analyze how motherhood is constructed as a cultural, political, and economic institution, paying attention to how race, class, dis/ability, sexuality, Indigeneity, and migration intersect in these constructions.
- Compare the policies and social practices that govern mothering across time, place, and social groups, identifying gaps and contradictions between theory and lived experience.
- Evaluate the influences of media, popular culture, and digital platforms in shaping discourses about motherhood, and how women (and communities) resist, negotiate, or rework those discourses.
- Assess the relationships among paid labour, reproductive labour, care labour, and emotional labour in mothers’ lives, including how these are reshaped under neoliberal capitalism and global care regimes.
- Apply feminist, queer, decolonial, and intersectional theoretical frameworks to interpret empirical and cultural texts about mothering.
- Reflect on positionality, ethics, and accountability in the scholarship about motherhood, particularly when engaging with communities and marginalized mothering perspectives.
- Project plausible futures of mothering (e.g., under climate crisis, anti-natalist discourse, care collectivization), and situate their own positional stance within them.
Evaluation
To receive credit for WGST 423, students must complete and submit all of the assignments and write the final exam. Students must achieve a minimum grade of D (50 percent) on the final exam and an overall grade of at least D (50 percent) for the course.
Students will be evaluated on their understanding of the concepts presented in the course and on their ability to apply those concepts. The final grade in the course will be based on the marks achieved for the following activities.
| Activity | Weight |
| Assignment 1: Auto-Ethnographic Reflection | 10% |
| Assignment 2: Critical Media Analysis | 15% |
| Assignment 3: Annotated Bibliography | 15% |
| Assignment 4: Research Paper | 30% |
| Final Exam | 30% |
| Total | 100% |
The final examination for this course must be requested in advance and written under the supervision of an AU-approved exam invigilator. Invigilators include either ProctorU or an approved in-person invigilation centre that can accommodate online exams. Students are responsible for payment of any invigilation fees. Information on exam request deadlines, invigilators, and other exam-related questions, can be found at the Exams and grades section of the Calendar.
Materials
Digital course materials
Links to the following course materials will be made available in the course:
Ross, L. R. (2016). Interrogating motherhood. AU Press. - DRR (PDF in AU Library) https://doi.org/10.15215/aupress/9781771991438.01
Physical course materials
The following course materials are included in a course package that will be shipped to your home prior to your course’s start date:
Kinser, A. E. (2010). Motherhood and feminism. Seal Press.
Other Resources
All other materials are available online.
Challenge for credit
Overview
The challenge for credit process allows you to demonstrate that you have acquired a command of the general subject matter, knowledge, intellectual and/or other skills that would normally be found in a university-level course.
Full information about challenge for credit can be found in the Undergraduate Calendar.
Evaluation
To receive credit for the WGST 423 challenge registration, students must achieve a grade of at least D (50 percent) on the Challenge Exam and a grade of at least D (50 percent) on the Major Research Paper. A passing grade (50 percent) must be achieved on the Challenge Exam before you may request the instructions for the Major Research Paper. Credit will be awarded as either a Pass or a Fail.
Challenge for credit course registration form