Description: Shows how US literary representations of mothering across racial, ethnic, and LGBTQ communities challenge ideological prescriptions about motherhood and maternal love.
Brief description: Mary Jo Bona is Distinguished SUNY Professor in the Department of Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University. Among her many books, she is the author of By the Breath of Their Mouths: Narratives of Resistance in Italian America and coeditor, with Irma Maini, of Multiethnic Literature and Canon Debates, also by SUNY Press.
Review Quotes:
"By placing literary texts by women from multiple ethnic cultures in conversation, Mary Jo Bona makes a much-needed intervention into motherhood studies. In Bona's reading, these texts demonstrate how women singularly construct practices of motherhood that resist social scripts. Among other things, the book offers a fresh, timely look at the AIDS health crisis and its impact on the LGBTQ community over decades and across genders, drawing on the work of Audre Lorde to explore literary representations of queer maternality among caretakers." - A Yęmisi Jimoh, coeditor of These Truly Are the Brave: An Anthology of African American Writings on War and Citizenship