Revolutionizing Motherlines

Victoria Bailey, Andrea O'Reilly, Fiona Joy Green

• Publisher: Demeter Press
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781772585674
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Colecciones literarias norteamericanas

Revolutionizing Motherlines reflects upon and troubles current and historical understandings of Naomi Ruth Lowinsky' s concept of the motherline that connects mothers to their female ancestors. Complicated histories of erasure and threads of hope are tied together with intellectually engaging and emotionally resonant dialogues about maternal lineage to illuminate previously silenced motherlines of diverse abilities, ethnicities, genders, sexualities, mothering identities, family forms, and parenting practices. The introduction of the concept of " mothervine" , an adaptation of Lowinsky' s motherline, creates a powerful image of winding vines and roots with pruned ends and overgrowths that inform how matricentric feminist scholars can deconstruct patriarchal concepts. By using innovative feminist images and language to define and express experiences of mothering, it revises the past and intervenes in ongoing debates about how to de-centre cisnormative models of lineage. Revolutionizing Motherlines creates a richness of meaning for those engaged in motherwork, and offers new insights into methodology, theory-building, and praxis of maternal scholarship.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The Motherline
• Chapter 2 Must We Know the Devil? A Family Story of Black Clubwomen, Westward Migration, and the Motherline
• Chapter 3 Matrifocal Families: Motherlines without Misogyny
• Chapter 4 Recovered Threads: Gathering the Pieces of Our Grandmother’s Life
• Chapter 5 “Are You My Mother(line)?” Disruption and Destruction of the Mother-Daughter Bond in the Foster Care System
• Chapter 6 In Search of the Goddess: Creating a Feminist Motherline for Mother-Daughter Connection and Empowerment
• Chapter 7 Who Cares If There Are No Women? An Intergenerational Conversation about Queer Parenting
• Chapter 8 Stitches to Sutures: Five Generations of Needlework
• Chapter 9 “If I Cannot Become Radha, I Can Become Yasodha”: Decolonizing Hijra Motherlines through Contemporary Indian TV Serial Taali
• Chapter 10 All of Us “A”: Healing the Motherline through Narrative Matroreform
• Chapter 11 A Singer for the Dead: Spiritual Motherlines in Lithuania across the Millennia
• Chapter 12 Mothervines: Maternal Lineage in Other Words
• Chapter 13 “I Wanted to Be Anyone Other Than the Mother I Came From”: Enacting a Motherline of Intergenerational Trauma to Expose, Explore, and Explain the Dark Side of Motherhood in Ashley Audrain’s The Push
• Chapter 14 Transforming Restrictive Motherlines into Flourishing Mothervines1
• Notes on Contributors
• Deepest appreciation to Demeter’s monthly Donors