Bad Mothers | 2nd Global Inclusive Interdisciplinary Conference

Revered as “givers of life,” bio-genealogical mothers occupy an important role in our world, often seen as the key to ensuring the ongoing survival of the human race. Though the bond between mother and child is commonly celebrated as sacred, cultural attitudes towards non-bio-genealogical parenting and child-rearing are often seen as inferior to the biological, nuclear family. At its worst, non-bio-genealogical and/or traditional families are condemned as threatening “traditional” family values, labelled as dangerous or “bad” for the children, “having an agenda,” or marked as deviant, perverse, or evil.

Queer theorists have criticized the ways heteronormativity, the nuclear family, and cultural pressures for citizens to reproduce, re-enforce oppressive systems including patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism, heteronormativity and white supremacy. Therefore, our second annual conference on Bad Mothers aims to transcend beyond traditional and oversimplified understandings of motherhood, mothering, and child-rearing as purely bio-genealogical and hetero- and cis-normative. In doing so, we invite discussions on all forms of non-traditional parenting that may be constituted as “bad” or threatening to society to examine how queerness, fostering, adoption, surrogacy, and all forms of non-nuclear family child-rearing are pathologized as threatening and “bad.”

The purpose of Bad Mothers is not, in essence, to criticize or condemn certain types of motherhood, biological or not. Rather, we wish to look beyond the oversimplified cultural attitudes and expectations of motherhood to examine, question, and analyse the pathologizing and demonization of queer, non-heteronormative, and/or non-bio-genealogical family and parenting. In doing so we wish to examine alternative forms of mothering and parenting that imagine queer futures of family, parenting, and community building.

In recognition on of the fundamentally interdisciplinary nature of motherhood, parenting, and the family, the Bad Mothers event seeks to provide a platform for participants to explore this multi-faceted topic with a view to forming a range of innovative interdisciplinary outputs, publications, courses and other materials and activities to engender further research and collaboration.

Visit the conference web page.