Pandemic Rhetorics of Motherhood (Panel)

Rhetoric & Composition / Women's and Gender Studies

Jeanne Rose (Pennsylvania State University Berks)

As the 2021 New York Times series “The Primal Scream” explains, the Covid-19 pandemic has left mothers in crisis. Exhausted by caregiving and homeschooling, many working mothers have left the workforce or downsized their roles. Maternal stress levels are soaring across all demographics, with women of color especially vulnerable to economic precarity. Structural change remains largely allusive even as vaccination rates prompt a return to “normalcy.” Despite—or perhaps because of—these gendered injustices, the pandemic has fueled a robust cultural conversation about the responsibilities and limitations of maternity. This discussion joins a longstanding preoccupation with motherhood, one that Lindal Buchanan’s Rhetorics of Motherhood (2013) has described as authorizing women’s lived experiences and simultaneously positioning them “within the gendered status quo.”

In keeping with Buchanan’s assessment, this panel seeks submissions using rhetorical and/or feminist theory to examine pandemic representations of motherhood and mothering, understood as encompassing parenting and caregiving broadly. Proposals exploring personal, political, economic, aesthetic, pedagogical, and other discourses of pandemic motherhood are welcome. Possible topics include, but aren’t limited to, the following: the mother as teacher, the mother as worker, mothers in popular culture, rhetorics of maternal health and wellness, rhetorics of maternal anxiety and contagion, rhetorics of maternal grief and loss, and post-pandemic motherhood. Participants are encouraged to consider pandemic rhetorics of motherhood as exigencies for meaningful social change.


This panel seeks submissions using rhetorical or feminist theory to examine pandemic representations of motherhood and mothering, understood as encompassing parenting and caregiving broadly. Proposals exploring personal, political, economic, aesthetic, pedagogical, and other discourses of pandemic motherhood are welcome.