In recent decades, popular culture - from television and film to newspapers, magazines, and best-selling fiction - has focused an enormous amount of attention on mothers. Through feminist, psychoanalytic, sociological, literary, and cultural studies perspectives, the twenty chapters in this book examine an array of current and relevant contemporary topics related to maternal identities such as working, stay-at-home, ambivalent, absent, good, bad, single, teen, elder, celebrity, and lesbian mothers; and issues such as the mommy wars, self-care, pregnancy, abortion, contraception, infanticide, adoption, sex and sexuality, breastfeeding, post-partum depression, fertility, genetics, and reproductive technologies. Contributors from Canada, the United States, Britain, and Australia engage critically and theoretically with stereotypes perpetuated by popular culture media, and chart some of the provocative and liberating ways that we can use and interpret this media to encourage and promote alternative and transformative maternal readings, identities, and practices. Mediating Moms looks at mothers as imaged by and in the media; how mothers mediate or negotiate these images according to their historical, corporeal, and lived personhoods; and how scholars mediate the popular and academic discourses of motherhood as a way of registering, strengthening, and alleviating the tensions between representation and reality. Mediating Moms engages critically with stereotypes perpetuated by popular culture, while mapping some of the provocative and liberating ways that mothers can use the media to transform and reaffirm their identities. Contributors include Jennifer Bell (Alberta), H. Louise Davis (Miami), Irene Gammel (Ryerson), Nicola Goc (Tasmania), Fiona Joy Green (Winnipeg), Latham Hunter (Mohawk), Joanne Ella Johnson, Hosu Kim (Staten Island), Beth O'Connor (Ontario Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing), Debra Langan (Wilfrid Laurier), Sally Mennill (British Columbia), Stuart J. Murray (Ryerson), Kathryn Pallister (Red Deer), Maud Perrier (Bristol), Lenora Perry (Texas), Dominique Russell, Jocelyn Stitt (Minnesota), Stephanie Wardrop (Western New England), Imelda Whelehan (Tasmania).

Elizabeth Podnieks is an associate professor in the Department of English and the graduate program in Communication and Culture at Ryerson University. She teaches and researches in the fields of mothering, life writing, modernism, and popular/celebrity culture. She is the author of Daily Modernism: The Literary Diaries of Virginia Woolf, Antonia White, Elizabeth Smart, and Anaïs Nin (2000) and the co-editor of Hayford Hall: Hangovers, Erotics, and Modernist Aesthetics (2005).

Andrea O’Reilly is an associate professor in the School of Women’s Studies at York University. She is co-editor/editor of many books on motherhood, including Maternal Theory: The Essential Readings (2007) and Feminist Mothering (2008). O’Reilly is author of Toni Morrison and Motherhood: A Politics of the Heart (2004) and Rocking the Cradle: Thoughts on Motherhood, Feminism, and the Possibility of Empowered Mothering (2006). She is founder and director of the Association for Research on Mothering, (ARM), founder and editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering, and founder and editor of Demeter Press, the first feminist press on motherhood.

Elizabeth Podnieks' profile page