Bad Mothers: Regulations, Represetatives and Resistance

By Hughes Michelle Miller

While the image or construct of the “good mother” has been the focus of many research projects, the “bad mother,” as a discursive construct, and also mothers who do “bad” things as complicated, agentic social actors, have been quite neglected, despite the prevalence of the image of the bad mother across late modern societies. The few researchers who address this powerful social image point out that bad mothers are culturally identified by what they do, yet they are also socially recognized by who they are. Mothers become potentially bad when they behave or express opinions that diverge from, or challenge, social or gender norms, or when they deviate from mainstream, white, middle class, heterosexual, nondisabled normativity. When suspected of being bad mothers, women are surveilled, and may be disciplined, punished or otherwise excluded, by various official agents (i.e. legal, medical and welfare institutions), as well as by their relatives, friends and communities. Too often, women are judged and punished without clear evidence that they are neglecting or abusing their children. Frequently they are blamed for the marginal sociocultural context in which they are mothering. This anthology presents empirical, theoretical and creative works that address the construct of the bad mother and the lived realities of mothers labeled as bad. Throughout the volume, the editors consider voices and acts of resistance to bad mother constructions, demonstrating that mothers, across time and across domains, have individually and collectively taken a stand against this destructive label.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Demeter Press
• Release date: Mar 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781772581102

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RESISTANCE

Copyright © 2017 Demeter Press

Individual copyright to their work is retained by the authors. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Front cover artwork: Freddie Robins, Bad Mother, 2013, machine knitted wool, machine knitted lurex, expanding foam, broken knitting needles, glass beads, sequins, dress pins, crystal beads on an oak and maple wood shelf, 780 x 160 x 160 mm. In Private Collection. Photograph: Douglas Atfield.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Bad mothers (2017)

Bad mothers : regulations, representations, and resistance / edited by Michelle Hughes Miller, Tamar Hager, and Rebecca Jaremko Bromwich.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-77258-103-4 (softcover)

1. Motherhood—Moral and ethical aspects. 2. Mothers—Conduct of life. 3. Mothers—Social conditions. I. Miller, Michelle Hughes, 1963-, author, editor II. Hager, Tamar, 1960–, author, editor III. Bromwich, Rebecca, author, editor IV. Title.

HQ759.B185 2017 306.874’3 C2017-901047-6

BAD MOTHERS

REGULATIONS, REPRESENTATIONS, AND RESISTANCE

EDITED BY

Michelle Hughes Miller, Tamar Hager, and Rebecca Jaremko Bromwich

DEMETER PRESS

To mothers whose identities have been harmed and judged harshly, whose mothering has been devalued, and whose motherhood has been colonized, questioned, or negated. You’ve had a daunting responsibility, and our social world should have done better by you.

From Michelle

To Kiri and Finley: thank you for holding me accountable to authenticity. Being your mother has been the greatest joy of my life.

From Tamar

To my daughters Naomi and Shira, with the hope that they will not have to be subject to such maternal surveillance.

From Rebecca

For my mother, and my daughters Helaina, Andromeda, and Myrina, and my son Desmond, and for Matt: may they know they are enough and are good enough.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

The Bad Mother, in Relief

Michelle Hughes Miller, Tamar Hager, and Rebecca Jaremko Bromwich

I: THE LEGAL AND REGULATORY LANDSCAPE

Arctic Motherwork

Rebecca Jaremko Bromwich

Still Wearing Scarlet? Discursive Figures of the Unfit Mother as Pervasive Phantoms Active in Governing Mothers through Ontario’s Child Protection Regime

Rebecca Jaremko Bromwich

Manufacturing Ideologies of the Bad Mother: Aboriginal Mothering, Neglectful Caregiving, and Symbolic Violence in the Ontario Child Welfare System

Mandi Veenstra and Marlee Keenan

Mothering in Prison: The Case of Spain’s New External Mother Units

Sophie Feintuch

II: MEDICALIZATION AS SOCIAL CONTROL

Mea Culpa

Noa Arad Yairi

Bad Mothers and the HIV/AIDS Epidemic in Saskatchewan, Canada

Pamela J. Downe

The Risky Mother:The Medicalization of Mothering

Alexandra Campbell

Hospital Archive

Rela Mazali

Fat Blame and Fat Shame: A Failure of Maternal Responsibility

Kelsey Ioannoni

III: CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS OF BAD MOTHERS

Protection

Nonavee Dale

Malas Madres in Contemporary Latin American Literature: Representing Ill-Fated Motherhood in Myriam Laurini’s

Qué Raro Que Me Llame Guadalupe María Alonso Alonso

Celluloid Marys:

Discovering and Listening to the Bad Mothers behind the Criminals in Popular Crime Films

Michelle Hughes Miller, Geraldine M. Hendrix-Sloan, and M. Joan McDermott

Bad Motherhood in Contemporary Argentine Cinema: Illustrating the New Political Agenda

Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, Patricia Vazquez, and Juan Juvé

IV: RESISTING BAD MOTHER NARRATIVES

Bad Mother

Freddie Robins

Underneath Broadmoor

Tamar Hager

Feminism, Infanticide, and Intersectionality in Victorian America

Keira V. Williams

Fixed or Shifting Notions of Bad Mother? Considering Past and Future Australian Adoption Practice

Susan Gair

Refusing to Obey: Bad Mothers in the Israeli Culture

Omri Herzog and Tamar Hager

V: WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

Wings and Roots

Heather Munro

FurryLove

Liat Elkayam

Medea Chic:

On the Necessity of Ethics as Part of the Critique of Motherhood

Miri Rozmarin

About the Contributors

Acknowledgements

As with any edited volume, nothing can be accomplished without the dedication of the authors and the support and guidance of the publishers—in this case the indomitable Andrea O’Reilly and her staff at Demeter Press, especially Angie Deveau. To our authors, we extend gratitude for your thoughtful, creative, and critical analyses of bad mothers that appear in this volume, along with your patience and commitment throughout the long editorial process. To the artists who shared their work with us, thank you. We knew early on we wanted visual representations of mothering and the bad mother in our volume, and your complex, emotive work allowed us to realize this vision. We would also be remiss if we didn’t acknowledge each other. As co-editors of this volume, we started out as strangers living in three separate countries with significant time differences, yet along the way, we found a way to work together collaboratively and openly—talking through our disagreements over skype and email, acknowledging each others’ time and personal commitments and challenges as they came along, and growing into both colleagues and friends who accomplished this task, and every aspect of this task, together. The outcome is a volume that merges our scholarly and creative vision for work on bad mothers that makes us all proud.

Any scholarly work needs time to come to completion and supportive care for the scholar. For Michelle, the time was made possible by the constant loving efforts of her husband, Rob Benford, while her emotional care was provided by a host of individuals who celebrated each accomplishment along the way, including Rob, her children, Kiri and Finn, and her colleague, Diane.

Tamar would like to thank her partner Yaron and her daughters, Naomi and Shira, for tolerating the fact that she was more busy than usual. She was wondering—usually with a smile—during the period of preparing the manuscript how odd it was that editing a book about bad mothering forced her to turn her back to her daughters, apparently becoming a bad mother.

Rebecca also acknowledges a debt of gratitude for the steady and unwavering support of her husband Matthew Bromwich, and the strong mentorship of her mother Beverley Smith, without whose feminist collaboration and creative vision, her politics and writing would not have been possible.

The Bad Mother, in Relief

MICHELLE HUGHES MILLER, TAMAR HAGER, AND REBECCA JAREMKO BROMWICH

And why is it in the case of women that we always blame the individual and not the social structure. That we see failure in discrete lives and do not question "the way things are."

—Susan Griffin (37)

Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me.

—Alice Walker (270)

Bad mothering is something that most of us assume we can recognize in all of its manifestations. It is abuse and neglect. It is failure to feed your child, and it is failure to care that your child is not thriving. It is abandonment. It is immoral conduct that contaminates the worldview of the vulnerable child. It is emotional and psychological violence. In is most extreme form, it is infanticide. These are not flaws, to use Alice Walker’s word. These are behaviours that we believe harm children, so of course mothers who engage in them are bad mothers. Good mothers are not violent or neglectful. Good mothers nurture and care for their children. Most importantly, good mothers and bad mothers are perceived to do different types of mothering and be different kinds of mothers. Thus, the failures of bad mothers are perceived to be in their maternal actions (or inactions) and in their identities, for which they alone are responsible. As Susan Griffin notes, we rarely pay attention to the context within which women mother or the structures that constrain their mothering choices. Instead, we focus our collective efforts on finding (and punishing) the bad mothers, so easily identified, we think, by the harm they do to their children.

If only it were that simple. In each of our home countries, as is the case elsewhere in the world, structures, systems, assumptions, and discourses continue to marginalize, punish, and define bad mothers in ways that go well beyond the naïve assumptions about what constitutes a bad mother. As these 2016 examples illustrate, mothering is rarely contextualized and the challenges that mothers face are rarely acknowledged when the trope of the Bad Mother¹ is applied:

a) As part of the fight against childhood obesity in Israel, health authorities displayed huge advertisements in bus stations depicting body parts and faces of obese children. One of the ads showed the stomach of a child with the caption in Hebrew: Mother, this is your child. The ads were removed a few weeks later after public outcry.

b) Sophie Gregoire-Trudeau, wife of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, was widely ridiculed with the hashtag #prayforsophie, after she had the audacity to suggest that with three small children and a large number of charitable and governmental duties to perform, she would need more help. She was widely disparaged in particular because the family already employs two nannies.

c) H.B. 6064, a bill submitted by two white male representatives in the Illinois legislature, would require an unmarried mother to name a father on her newborn’s birth certificate. Failure to do so—or to designate another family member who will financially provide for the child in the event that the father is not identified through DNA evidence—would require the state to refuse to issue a birth certificate for the child and would make the mother ineligible for state financial aid to help care for the child (Cynic). The bill is currently tabled in committee.

What these examples illustrate is the diversity of ways that bad mothers are constructed. Single mothers, working mothers, wealthy mothers, mothers who do not work outside the home, poor mothers, and mothers of obese children are only a few of the mothers so labelled in our social worlds. Mothers who drink, smoke, eat cold cuts, take cold medicine, exercise too much, exercise too little, eat the wrong fish, drink caffeine, paint the nursery, do not get prenatal care, use a midwife, or ignore the doctor’s recommendations during pregnancy are bad mothers. Mothers who are unemployed, on welfare, poor, or homeless are bad mothers. Mothers who work too much, travel too much, or stress too much are bad mothers. Mothers who have too many children are bad mothers, especially if they are women of colour or poor or on welfare. Mothers who give their children up for adoption are bad mothers. Mothers who do not want the children they have but raise them anyway are bad mothers. Mothers with diagnosed mental health issues are bad mothers. Mothers who self-medicate to avoid mental health diagnoses are bad mothers. Mothers who self-medicate to deal with their mental illnesses are bad mothers. Mothers with disabilities are bad mothers. Mothers of children with disabilities are bad mothers. Mothers of colour or Aboriginal mothers—especially if they are poor or unmarried—should not be mothers; thus, they are bad mothers. Single mothers. Non-heterosexual mothers. Too young mothers. Too old mothers. Too anxious mothers, worried about the welfare or achievements of their children. Too distant mothers, too selfish to concern herself with her children’s needs. Too busy. Too connected to social media. Too tired….

Need we go on?

If the violently abusive mother who kills her child, the woman who had an abortion, and the mother working out of state whose boyfriend kills her child while a thousand miles away, are all presented by the media and treated in the courts as murderers, our cultural and punitive use of the Bad Mother trope has moved into a complex political, social, and ideological label. The Bad Mother is not just the mother who is perceived to harm her child in some unambiguously wrong way. Other mothers, whose inferior identities in the social structure make them suspect, are struggling to fulfill their own motherhood obligations and proscriptions, and in the process doing or saying things that may be perceived as harmful to their children. Such mothers also find themselves sucked into the maelstrom of the Bad Mother label. It is the stories of these mothers that our authors analyze in this volume, as they strive to broaden our understanding of the institutionalized intrusiveness of the Bad Mother trope in mothers’ lives.

As we are writing this chapter the film, Bad Moms is in theatres across North America and around the world. The film focuses on three mothers who decide they have had enough of the demands of perfect motherhood. Amy, the protagonist, (played by Mila Kunis) articulates this frustration when she states: I’m so tired of trying to be this perfect mom. I’m done. The mothers form an alliance and resist cultural expectations to be a perfect mother, pledging instead to be bad moms. For Amy, trapped in a never-ending pattern of caring for others, this pledge has major consequences. After she stops making her middle-school children breakfast, she identifies other ways to be bad. Following a typical Hollywood trajectory, her bad mom identity and increasingly bad behaviours—such as bringing store-bought food to the school bake sale, missing work, or throwing a drunken party—initially empower her and, in some ways, strengthen her relationships with both children. But this temporary reprieve eventually results in social punishment for both her and her children as various social forces rein her in. After her daughter is benched on her soccer team, as punishment to her mother, Amy finds herself alone and bereft. She has lost her job, her children (who decide to stay with their father for a while), and her understanding of herself as a mother. The movie culminates in redemption: Amy publicly asserts her bad mom identity and urges other moms to admit that they are not perfect either, which results in her support and acceptance by her fellow bad moms in the parent-teacher association.

The movie oozes white, Western, upper-middle-class privilege, which gives Amy the opportunity to claim her maternal failures as gifts, as the above-quoted Walker quote asserts. The middle-class privilege, in particular, allows all of the changes that Amy makes in her life to assume her bad mom identity. But beyond the racial and economic privilege the mothers have that allow them to be bad, what is fascinating about the movie in the context of this edited volume is the way being bad is defined and resisted in this film. Amy and her friends do not critique the systems within which mothers struggle to survive—such as the American corporate world, which is unconcerned about their multiple responsibilities, or the cultural and marketing images that reinforce their self-blame and frustration. Nor do they critique their children’s other parents who might share some of the burdens leading to the mothers’ crises. As Griffin’s quote from the beginning of this chapter articulates, the film does not question how things are. Rather than identifying those aspects of Western contemporary culture that are complicit with societal institutions (particularly medical, legal, economic ones), which seemingly are designed to control and denigrate mothers’ lives through inadequate and/or punitive policies and practices, the film tells mothers that the goal should be to work harder to be good but to accept that they are bad. Not only does this message narrow the Good Mother trope to include only perfection, it constructs bad mothering as relatively innocuous behaviours for which middle-class mothers are judged and punished. Such a construction is insufficient as a cultural critique of motherhood because in this model, all mothers are presumed to be good, which is rare, or are trying to be good, which is more likely. Such differentiation erases the possibility of bad mothering as discussed in this volume (and which many mothers find their behaviours labelled). In this strange dichotomy, the film does not contrast the Good Mother with the Bad Mother; instead, it contrasts the Good Mother with a lesser version of itself. Our volume rejects this restricted view of bad mothering. Instead, our authors show how the Bad Mother trope is not invisible but rather is a distinguishable cultural image that is used to control and manipulate mothers. Nor is the Bad Mother simply an aspiring Good Mother, although its origin is derived from research on the good mother.

THE BAD MOTHER AND THE GOOD MOTHER

The definition of a bad mother is determined and culturally structured in light of the definition of the Good Mother, a relatively new concept. The term good motherhood—instinctive maternal love—did not exist in Western culture prior to the eighteenth century, and it is the result of complex economic and political processes (Chase and Rogers; Forna; Gillis; Hufton; Rich; Smart). The historians John Gillis and Laurence Stone assert that until the eighteen century women gave birth but did not necessarily raise their children because of status and economic reasons. Yet in the wake of massive social changes and demographic fears of widespread death of their children in the eighteenth century, a need arose to create a specific social agent who would care for children, which resulted in the creation of the mother role as it is known today (Forna; Ladd Taylor and Imansky). This role determines that women are supposed to not only give birth to children but also to raise them and take care of their education. The mothers’ social value and psychological welfare hinge on performing their roles in the socially and institutionally proscribed manner.

One of the strongest social mechanisms for establishing the mother role was the figure of the Good Mother, which is a formula of the norms and the social and psychological demands of motherhood at any given time. In her classic book on mothering, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, Adrienne Rich describes the Good Mother as a person with no identity other than her motherhood, who finds deep gratification in spending a whole day in the company of small children; she is attuned to the needs of others. Motherly love is unconditional love, devoid of egoism.

Rich was not the only person who identified this ideal of motherhood and criticized it as a mechanism of oppression. Early feminist writing on motherhood critiques the cultural image of the Good Mother (Badinter; Bernard; Chase and Rogers; Dalley; Douglas and Michaels; Griffin; Lazarre; Rubin Sulieman; Ruddick). At the base of these studies lies the concept of the institution of motherhood. The term was first posited by the sociologist Jesse Bernard, who argues that motherhood is not an inborn biological process but a changing social role composed of norms and a tradition of concern for raising their children. Rich claims that motherhood is a patriarchal institution managed and controlled by men, who have legal, technical, and ideological control over all aspects of childbirth and motherhood. The Good Mother ideal and its incumbent expectations thus imprison women within patriarchal motherhood. Today, good motherhood is a mechanism of surveillance and regulation to which all mothers are held accountable (Douglas and Michaels). We assert that it is the Good Mother’s elusiveness (as a goal) and her reification (under patriarchy) that mark her prominence in our cultural motif.

Ultimately, the Bad Mother trope arises from the cultural inculcation of the Good Mother and its successful institutionalization. The Good Mother shapes the Bad Mother through its mechanisms of accountability to the expectations that it holds. Consequently, the Bad Mother becomes an additional effective social and cultural mechanism of surveillance and control. Furthermore, the Bad Mother helps to understand and analyze the Good Mother through the processes by which bad mothers and bad mothering are defined and, more importantly, regulated. Both labels are bound to patriarchal motherhood and women’s oppression as mothers within patriarchy. Although our collection refers to the norms at the foundation of the Good Mother, our authors energize scholarship on the Bad Mother to better understand this less researched cultural and social trope and its explicit power in the lives of mothers.

The Bad Mother has been discussed in books before this one, which has provided a wealth of theoretical and empirical scholarship to learn from and build on in this book. From Ladd-Taylor and Umansky’s edited volume Bad Mothers: The Politics of Blame in Twentieth Century America to Thurer’s The Myths of Motherhood: How Culture Reinvents the Good Mother and Caplan’s The New Don’t Blame Mother: Mending the Mother-Daughter Relationship, scholars have embraced the need to critically analyze the construction and the effect of the Bad Mother. In considering the Bad Mother image, however, most feminist research on motherhood presents specific cases of mothers who abused, abandoned, neglected, and even murdered their children (Douglas and Michaels; Forna; Rich) but avoids generalized description of the figure, which continues to be largely defined as the Other in comparison to the Good Mother.

Demeter Press has greatly contributed to our understanding of the Bad Mother label by publishing several volumes in recent years dealing specifically with aspects of this social and cultural construction. In The Mother-Blame Game, Vanessa Reimer and Sarah Sahagian consider how the narrowing of standards of good mothering broadens the construction of the Bad Mother when we assess the effects our parenting has on our children. Whenever we question the source of our children’s mishaps or misbehaviours, mother blame is there as a ready explanation. Joanne Minaker and Bryan Hogeveen in Criminalized Mothers, Criminalizing Mothering take a different approach: they highlight the systems of control that surround and (sometimes) literally imprison mothers for situations often beyond their control. Yet the criminalized mothers are not powerless, as they sometimes envision themselves as good or good enough mothers and reject the Bad Mother label for their mothering practices. Demeter Press has also published volumes in which the Bad Mother appears, such as in Disabled Mothers: Stories and Scholarship By and About Mothers with Disabilities. Several chapters discuss the labelling and stigmatization of mothers with disabilities (Motopanyane; McDonald-Harker).

From these sources, it is clear that bad mothering is ubiquitous, as mother blame permeates our social worlds. Bad mothering has been defined and punished around the world, yet the Bad Mother is not constructed the same in all social contexts or in all locations. So the discursive presence of widely held assumptions about bad mothers, while expected, may mean different demands and accountabilities for mothers with different positionalities (e.g. race, ethnicity, sexuality, bodies, etc.) in different locales.

Mother blame is frequently the mechanism by which the Bad Mother trope is applied. It arises from an assessment of harm or risk, which requires a surveillance culture within which such assessments can arise along with individual experts willing to designate such behaviours as risky or harmful. Thus, mother blame necessitates a standard by which mothers can be compared—contained in the Bad Mother trope—and individuals invested in enforcing it. Conversely, mother blame may also arise from identity claims that have little to do with harm or risk but much to do with a gross discomfort with difference. Mothers of colour, mothers with disabilities, queer mothers, impoverished mothers, Aboriginal mothers—all these groups and many others have faced disapprobation not because of their actions as mothers but because of their identity and social status as mothers who do not fit the narrow racist, classist, gendered, ableist and heterosexist standards of idealized motherhood in Western culture. Such mothers’ burden to mother, to be valued in their mothering, and to resist the Bad Mother label is then more difficult (at times, impossible) because their identities and their failures intersect to mark them within the surveillance culture.

What do we not know about bad mothering and the Bad Mother image? Although some research has discussed bad mothers, the characteristics of this label elude us, possibly because it is so context specific. Scholars have also not yet fully explored how institutions such as the law, medicine, or the media transform the Bad Mother trope into social control over mothers, often with disastrous consequences. In other words, we are still working to identify the processes by which the Bad Mother is used by state actors, cultural channels, and other officials to designate and punish bad mothers. How and why are identities and ideologies woven into policy and by whom? We need to investigate the surveillance culture within which mothers live, including how we maintain it within an evolving social context and ongoing resistance to the Bad Mother label. Unpacking the gendered and intersectional aspects of surveillance is key to assessing the social psychology and the sociology of these interactional, power-driven dynamics. Most importantly, we do not yet know how and under what conditions resistance to Bad Mother mechanisms of control and regulation is effective and transformative. Given the damage this label has done to mothers over the past few centuries, understanding more about resistance—including its forms, its strategies and its targets—would help us to envision a world where mothers are not unjustly prosecuted and judged and where the patriarchal demands of the Good Mother are themselves regulated by a collective awareness of context and a rejection of standardization. To do this, we need to work toward an understanding of the intersections of patriarchal motherhood with other global constructs—such as capitalism, neoliberalism, and nationalism—topics our authors briefly examine in this volume but are natural foci in future examinations of the Bad Mother.

ORGANIZATION OF THE VOLUME

Our collection considers the Bad Mother from different angles and different cultures to create a mosaic of the insidious ways that the Bad Mother label defines mothers and is used to evaluate them, regulate them, and punish them within their social worlds. In each section of this volume, our authors work to unveil the image of the Bad Mother—its representations in culture, its construction and management within policy, and its reification in social interactions. In describing the Bad Mother, some of our authors labour to reveal the ideologies and discourses that create this image and its control over mothers’ lives. Others describe the context of the existence of this trope, debating when, for whom, and against whom it is used. Several of our authors detail various forms of resistance against the Bad Mother label. Collectively, our authors address issues of mother blame, maternal practice, surveillance, stigmatization, and vilification. Along the way, they confront racism, classism, nationalism, and sexism as interlocking tools wielded by other mothers, by popular culture, by various authorities, and by the state in constructing, manipulating, and applying the Bad Mother label. In academic writing and creative writing our authors speak about and to the elusive image of the Bad Mother. Our authors bring various types of academic discourses into this discussion—including gender studies, sociology, history, cultural studies, legal studies, social work, media studies, and literary analysis—and frequently apply them through a feminist lens. Some of our authors use fiction and visual art as their medium for understanding this cultural, social, and political phenomenon; the reader will find such writings and artistic images scattered throughout the volume. The collection begins with our cover art by Freddie Robins (more on Robins’s art is in Section IV). In the artistic pieces that are integrated into our volume, visual depictions of (bad) mothers and mothering are shown in glorious diversity, reminding us of the various manifestations of this cultural and social trope in mothers’ lives and its interconnections with the powerful myth of the Good Mother. We are excited about these contributions to our volume, as our artistic pieces often provide a subtle consideration of the Bad Mother in ways that our scholarly pieces do not.

There is also much overlap between our sections, although we have thematically grouped the chapters to address issues of regulation, representation, and resistance, per the subtitle of our volume. Resistance to the Bad Mother trope, for instance, runs throughout our volume, along with an acknowledgment of the synergy between cultural and institutional processes of social control. In Section I, we present four chapters that consider the legal and regulatory landscape of bad mothers. We begin with the legal world because when state power employs the Bad Mother trope, the effects are punitive, as any and every policy becomes a potential opportunity to control the lives of mothers and of women. Criminalized, marginalized, incarcerated, or regulated, the mothers in these chapters face the cruelty and arbitrariness of state policy targeting their ways of mothering or their identities, even as it is disguised as bureaucratic management. The outcome is a narrowing of maternal possibilities and practices as the mothers—who are a priori marginalized through their social class, indigeneity, or social location—are permanently stamped with the Bad Mother label.

In her chapter titled Arctic Motherwork, Rebecca Jaremko Bromwich begins the collection with a visual depiction of the paradoxical and fraught social position of Inuit mothers in contemporary Canada through their artistic surrogates, polar bear mothers. In describing her painting, Bromwich notes the intimate historical connection between the Inuit and polar bears and the similar constructions of these mothers as dangerous and bad by Canadian authorities. Yet the reality—that their vulnerability is because of the regulations that have violated their cultures and their homes—is overshadowed by their official denigration under the law. This powerful image is followed by two chapters that further discuss the indictment of Aboriginal mothers as bad. In Still Wearing Scarlet? Discursive Figures of the Unfit Mother as Pervasive Phantoms Active in Governing Mothers through Ontario’s Child Protection Regime, Bromwich asks how mothers’ fitness is assessed within Canadian child protection discourse, specifically that of the country’s largest province. Her critical discourse analysis details how the stripping of stereotypes from official policy discourse did little to eradicate the power of the unfit mother stereotype to label racially marginalized mothers. By assuming the stereotype is true but removing it from official discourse, protective service workers’ decision making becomes the key to the continuation of the disproportionate labelling of Aboriginal and racially marginalized mothers as unfit.

To add to this conversation, Mandi Veenstra and Marlee Keenan trace current ideologies of bad mothering for Aboriginal mothers to their history of colonization. In Manufacturing Ideologies of the ‘Bad’ Mother: Aboriginal Mothering, ‘Neglectful’ Caregiving, and Symbolic Violence in the Ontario Child Welfare System, the authors describe the ways that Aboriginal mothers have experienced symbolic violence, such as through the historical forced removal of their children and through the contemporary criminalization of their poverty. The authors’ description of the latter is particularly poignant, as the mothers’ cultural and survival strategies become reconstructed as neglect rather than being seen as powerful indicators of successful maternal practice. They conclude by warning that social change cannot occur without Aboriginal communities gaining authority over child welfare practices within their own communities.

In Mothering in Prison: The Case of Spain’s New External Mother Units, Sophie Feintuch approaches the legal landscape of motherhood differently by looking inside a women’s prison at the mothers who reside there. Examining Spain’s new external mother units, Feintuch demonstrates how such units, designed to empower and educate the mothers so as to reduce recidivism among them, in fact reify a white, Western, and middle-class vision of motherhood that few of the mothers embraced. Incorporating the perspectives of prison personnel and the mothers themselves, Feintuch explores such issues as maternalism and identity, as she describes the mothers’ efforts to manage their own and others’ expectations within the metaphorical Panopticon that is their prison home.

Section II considers the complicity of the medical establishment in the regulation of mothers. In this section, the Bad Mother can be detected within the duplicity of medicalization that purports to improve mothers’ lives just as it dictates their behaviours. Mothers, in these chapters, make bad choices from the perspectives of health authorities who are actively surveilling the minute details of their mothering, which results in the perceived need to moderate and manage the mothers that they watch in increasingly intrusive ways.

In Mea Culpa, Noa Arad Yairi visually depicts her struggle with mother blame following her son’s ADD diagnosis, despite the fact she sees herself as a good mother. Her failures become his burden to bear. In ‘Bad Mothers’ and the HIV/AIDS Epidemic in Saskatchewan, Canada, Pamela J. Downe maps the incursion of the Bad Mother rhetoric into the lives of women living with HIV/AIDS or injection drug use. Because of the high rates of HIV in Aboriginal communities, the target of public interventions has frequently been Aboriginal mothers, who are depicted as central to the epidemic. This intense gaze has not gone unnoticed by Downe’s Aboriginal mother participants, who share their frustrations with being seen as poison or a risk to their children. In response, the mothers talked of rejecting these imposed images by asserting their connections to kin and historical Aboriginal caregiving practices.

Risk is also a theme in The Risky Mother: The Medicalization of Mothering, by Alexandra Campbell. Campbell takes on fetal origins research and attachment theory to argue that scientific mothering focuses on marginalized mothers, even as it ignores inequalities within the science itself. And using Michel Foucault’s conceptualization of power, she illustrates the discursive shift from regulation to self-regulation, with pregnant women particularly subject to