Author Meets Readers | Mother Trouble: Mediations of White Maternal Angst after Second Wave Feminism
Thursday, January 30th, 2025 at 5:30 pm to 7:00 pm
- In-person event
- Irene’s Pub Restaurant, Ottawa, ON, K1S 3W4
About the Book
Mother Trouble traces white maternal angst in popular culture across a span of more than fifty years, from the iconic Rosemary’s Baby to anti-vaxx mom memes and HGTV shows. The book narrows in on popular media to think about white maternal angst as a manifestation of feminism’s unrealized possibilities and continued omissions since the second wave. It interrogates intersecting systems of power which make mothers and their children the most impoverished people in the world and urges a greater appreciation in academic and popular thinking of the work that mothers do.
The book calls for an analytical expansion beyond gender to better address the erasure of reproductive labour, and especially that performed by migrants and people of colour. It illustrates the continued marginalization of racialized mothers and the disproportionate amount of labour performed by all mothers in a society where their work is devalued. Ultimately, Mother Trouble reveals how the unease around white motherhood in the media has become a proxy for the troubles faced by all mothers.
About the Author
Miranda J. Brady is an associate professor in Communication and Media Studies at Carleton University. Her current research explores issues in Motherhood Studies and Critical Autism Studies as they intersect with communication and media. She is author of the University of Toronto Press book, Mother Trouble: Mediations of White Maternal Angst After Second Wave Feminism (October, 2024) and co-author with John M.H. Kelly of the 2017 UBC Press Book, We Interrupt this Program: Indigenous Media Tactics in Canadian Culture. She co-edited the 2022 Studies in Social Justice special issue, Autism_Media_Social Justice and has authored or co-authored more than 20 peer-reviewed book chapters and articles in the Journal of Gender Studies and Feminist Media Studies among others. She is mother to two human children and a doodle dog.
About the Panelists
Sasha Kardish is a high school teacher, wife and mother. After living in Toronto for 14 years and teaching English, she made the pandemic move back to her hometown of Ottawa. She now works with autistic teenagers in a specialized program. When she’s not teaching or parenting, she is often reading, cooking, reluctantly exercising and joyfully listening to schlocky true crime podcasts.
Marie-Eve Carrier-Moisan is the incumbent of the Joint Chair in Women’s Studies at Carleton University and the University of Ottawa (2023-2025) and an Associate Professor in Anthropology at Carleton University. Currently, her work explores issues related to institutional abandonment, bureaucratic care, and the social production of disability in school institutions of the Québec city region, including a SSHRC-funded project conducted in collaboration with Dr. Laurence Simard-Gagnon on the role of school transportation in access to schooling for autistic students. Dr. Carrier-Moisan has a longstanding interest in visual anthropology and in the circulation of feminist knowledges. In collaboration with Dr. William Flynn and Débora Santos, she has turned her prior ethnography of sex tourism into a graphic novel, with Gringo Love: Stories of Sex Tourism in Brazil. Dr. Carrier-Moisan continues to explore different ways of communicating research in her collaborative project with Dr. Simard-Gagnon, including through the development of narrative cartographies.