Call for Papers
Special Issue, Fall 2026: “Bad Moms”
Edited by Maik Stanitzke, Bentley University
Abstracts Due: Dec 1, 2025
Full Papers Due: January 18, 2026
This is a call for contributions to a special issue of the Journal of Feminist Scholarship organized around the figure of the “bad mom,” labor, and gender.
Jon Lucas and Scott Moore’s 2016 slapstick comedy Bad Moms vividly illustrates the impossible task facing mothers who must balance career and childcare. Despite her privilege, the protagonist, Amy, struggles to be the successful and caring good mother everyone else manages to be. Only by becoming the titular bad mom does Amy create some breathing room for herself. Yet because the movie relentlessly individualizes motherhood, stripping the competing demands of being a woman and being a mother, of the racial, heterosexual, and class privileges coloring the normative ideal of a good mother, it cannot imagine reproductive justice beyond the right to booze, party, and sleep late. In 2025, the popularity of the tradwife movement or phenomenon seems to offer a version of empowerment sharply contrasting Amy’s partying mom, tapping into motherhood ideals centered on reproductive capabilities and conservative arbiters of gender. But though they may appear as competing visions of what it means to be a good mother, both do little to challenge the systemic political, legal, and cultural barriers to reproductive justice. The false choice between the two defines through exclusion those mothers and caretakers already vilified as “bad moms”: immigrant mothers, “welfare queens,” single mothers, queer mothers, fat mothers, poor mothers, surrogate mothers, mothers who feed their kids unhealthy food or fill their kids’ heads with “gender ideology.”
Taking its cue from Bad Moms, this special issue of JFS will explore interdisciplinary feminist inquiries into historical and contemporary constructions of the figure of the “bad mom.” In what ways do mothers function as arbiters of gender? What can bad moms teach us about race, gender, and the capitalization of labor? What affective relations bind figures of the bad mom to intimate and collective fantasies of the good life? What historical and contemporary accounts of motherhood might generate constructions of gendered labor that are equitable and just?
We invite submissions exploring the figure of the bad mom from a variety of theoretical paradigms and across the disciplines, including but not limited to:
- Race and racialization
- Commodification and patriarchal appropriation of the labors of motherhood
- Neoliberal fantasies of the good life/“cruel optimism”
- (Post-(post-))feminist critiques of “bad moms” in popular culture
- Queer and transgender critiques of “bad moms”
- Postcolonial and decolonial critiques of “bad moms”
- Disability studies/crip theory and critiques of “bad moms”
- Domesticity and surrogacy
- Construction and regulation of public and private spaces
- Medical and legal discourses
- Nations and nationality; citizenship
- Utopias and dystopias
- Class and classism
- Surveillance and state control
Please send abstracts of 400-500 words and include 3-5 relevant citations to Maik Stanitzke, Assistant Professor of English and Media Studies:
