Mothers and Sons: Centering Mothering Knowledge

Demeter Press has announced its forthcoming publication, Mothers and Sons: Centering Mothering Knowledge, edited by Wanda Thomas Bernard and JMU's own Besi Brillian Muhonja (June 2016). Congrats Besi!

Conceptual and empirical studies as well as creative works tend to primarily contemplate parental interactions and influence in same sex generational dyads, resulting in a dearth of scholarship on motherhood in relation to sonhood. The philosophy that fathers raise sons and mothers raise daughters has compromised investment and progress in research in this area. This presumed gendered parental legacy not only privileges patriarchal estimations of motherhood, but also tenders universal approaches to the proper parenting of sons, erasing the diversity of mother-son experiences. This anthology, in a departure from common approaches to studying motherhood, principally privileges mother knowledge and not knowledge about mothers. The autoethnographic lens applied in the different contributions centre phenomenological mother knowledge in examining occupational, relational and emotional dimensions of mothering sons.

Mothers and Sons: Centering Mother Knowledge makes a case for the need to de-gender the framing and study of parental legacy. The actualization of an entire collection on this dyad foregrounding motherhood without particularizing the absence of fatherhood is in itself revolutionary. This assemblage of analytical, narrative and creative renderings offers cross-disciplinary conceptualizations of maternal experiences across difference and mothering sons at intersections. The authors' mother knowledge, or that of their subjects, delivers new insights into the appellations mother, son, motherhood and sonhood.