The reversal of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization on June 24, 2022 left pregnant people, potentially pregnant people, feminist theorists and activists grappling with the consequences. This panel registers the reverberations of the Dobbs decision while addressing the broader critical paradigm of Reproductive Justice. Our literary focus on novels and poems from the mid-nineteenth century to the present allows for a textured and complex attention to questions of maternal subjectivity and affect. While motherhood is associated with the heights and depths of human experience --joy and sorrow-- it is also crucially aligned with the less charged emotional states that often accompany unglamorous care labour. The papers on this panel touch on all these issues while demonstrating an interest in theories of mourning and materiality that delineate the maternal as an irreducibly liminal state with the potential to resituate our understanding of the relational more broadly. The four twelve-minute papers draw on a broad range of theoretical and literary scholarship (including works by Lisa Baraitser, Alys Weinbaum, Dorothy Roberts, Lisa Guenther, Rosalyn Diprose and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek) as they attempt to answer distinct but related questions about “The Joys and Sorrows of Motherhood.”

In “Infanticidal Feeling in Frances Harper’s ‘The Slave Mother: A Tale of the Ohio,’” Charline Jao examines infanticide in Harper’s poetic portrait of Margaret Garner and asks “How does a poem about infanticide rhetorically disrupt the timelines of national progress?” Drawing on the work of Derrick Spires, Matt Sandler, and others who approach Harper as an activist conscious of white sympathy’s limitations, Jao underscores the radical impact of Harper’s poem by linking it to two texts that hover over this period’s infanticide narratives: Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Wordsworth’s “The Thorn.” Jao argues that Harper rejects the rehabilitative impulses of Stowe and the opaque belatedness of Wordsworth and instead confronts the realities of infanticide with lucidity and immediacy. Harper’s poem, Jao contends, offers a practice of maternity that ruptures nineteenth-century models of maternal feeling - untangling joy from conformity and sorrow from death.

In “Birthing Out of Sight: The Consecration of Maternal Space in The Joys of Motherhood” Comfort Azubuko-Udah asks “What does a (postcolonial) novel choose to foreground and obscure as it tracks the experience of giving birth in relationship to traditional and colonial social formations?” Even as Buchi Emechta’s 1979 novel announces its apparent concern with affective questions of womanhood and motherhood it spends little time depicting the spaces associated with the feminine and womanhood in Igbo society. While it gestures towards the market, trading, birthing, and nurturing children as areas where feminine power resides, The Joys of Motherhood simultaneously renders those spaces relatively obscure and out of sight. As the novel progresses through time, notes Azubuko-Udah, it moves its main characters to more urbanized spaces where the consequences of colonial cultural imperialism are more conspicuous and the spaces of matriarchal power gradually shrink. This disempowerment, Azubuko-Udah contends, is congruous with the attenuated spaces of child birthing and nurturing and the diminished social status of the novel’s protagonist, Nnu Ego.

The papers by Heather Latimer and Naomi Morgenstern ask how we should theorize the proliferation and particularity of contemporary reproductive (techno-) dystopias. In “The Joys and Sorrows of Motherhood in End Times,” Latimer assesses the role of motherhood in contemporary dystopian fiction and asks if these depictions act as warnings, showing us a picture of what we don’t want as a future society or as accurate depictions of the contemporary reproductive landscape. Drawing on the work of Frederic Jameson and others, Latimer argues that the genre provides a unique vantage point for exploring both the joys and sorrows of motherhood during an increasingly dystopic moment for reproductive justice. In “Cloning and The (Post)Maternal in Carola Dibbell’s The Only Ones,” Morgenstern looks at polemical anti-clone literature and uses Dibbell’s novel (a maternal story in which the child in question is a clone of her mother and in which unnamed clone offspring function as direct narrative addressees) to inform a critique of the humanist fantasy that this polemic can only partially disguise. What Dibbell’s novel proposes, Morgenstern asserts, is a posthumanist figuration that sutures “natality” to the materiality of reproduction, thereby offering us a non-foundational maternal ethic. If neoliberal versions of postmaternal thinking at once devalue maternal labour and inform the more general impoverishment of the public sphere, this panel asks how literary and theoretical interventions might help us to rethink and reclaim the postmaternal for feminist politics.