*CFP* "EXPLORING MOTHERLY INSTINTICS: REPRESENTATION OF MOTHERS IN INDIAN CINEMA", SPECIAL ISSUE, CAFÉ DISSENSUS JOURNAL

The figure of the mother has always been glorified and depicted in black and white without shades of grey. However, time and again filmmakers and academic thinkers have strived to push this conventional depiction to accommodate various layers associated with the concept of motherhood, as they have sought to challenge the simplistic representation of mothers in popular media. It is important to explore the maternal world further in this highly digitized, globalized and gender-neutral environment.

This proposed issue of Café Dissensus aims to curate a collection of essays on the representation of mothers in films that go beyond the stereotypical portrayal of motherhood as epitomized in the figures of Nirupa Roy and Rakhee Gulzar in conventional Bollywood style, showing unconditional love toward her offspring. 

The proposed issue welcomes submissions on the following themes (though not limited to them):

• Queerness and motherhood 
• Good vs. bad mothers 

*CFP* "EXPLORING MOTHERLY INSTINCTS: REPRESENTATION OF MOTHERS IN INDIAN CINEMA", PROPOSED ISSUE, CAFÉ DISSENSUS JOURNAL

The figure of the mother has always been glorified and depicted in black and white without shades of grey. However, time and again filmmakers and academic thinkers have strived to push this conventional depiction to accommodate various layers associated with the concept of motherhood, as they have sought to challenge the simplistic representation of mothers in popular media. It is important to explore the maternal world further in this highly digitized, globalized and gender-neutral environment. 

This proposed issue of Café Dissensus aims to curate a collection of essays on the representation of mothers in films that go beyond the stereotypical portrayal of motherhood as epitomized in the figures of Nirupa Roy and Rakhee Gulzar in conventional Bollywood style, showing unconditional love toward her offspring. 

The proposed issue welcomes submissions on the following themes (though not limited to them):

• Queerness and motherhood 
• Good vs. bad mothers 

*CFP* "EXPLORING MOTHERLY INSTINCTS: REPRESENTATION OF MOTHERS IN INDIAN CINEMA", ISSUE 63, CAFÉ DISSENSUS MAGAZINE

The figure of the mother has always been glorified and depicted in black and white without shades of grey. However, time and again filmmakers and academic thinkers have strived to push this conventional depiction to accommodate various layers associated with the concept of motherhood, as they have sought to challenge the simplistic representation of mothers in popular media. It is important to explore the maternal world further in this highly digitized, globalized and gender-neutral environment. This proposed issue of Café Dissensus aims to curate a collection of essays on the representation of mothers in films that go beyond the stereotypical portrayal of motherhood as epitomized in the figures of Nirupa Roy and Rakhee Gulzar in conventional Bollywood style, showing unconditional love toward her offspring. The proposed issue welcomes submissions on the following themes (though not limited to them):

• Queerness and motherhood 
• Good vs. bad mothers 
• Evolution of the representation of mothers in cinema 
• Modern women and motherhood 
• Reimagining the domestic space 
• Masculinity and motherhood 

*CFP* "MEDIATING MOTHER-ACTIVISM", BOOK CHAPTER

Recent years have seen a renewed interest in exploring motherhood and mothering as political and emotional resources for digital activism. Although the intertwinement of mothering and politics predates the digital context, feminist debates around the politicization of mothering, from protests against state killings and disappearances, via the role of the mother in nation-building, to advocacy for right wing populisms, need addressing all the more urgently as we endeavour to understand the ways in which mothering is not only mediatised, but agentively deployed across social media platforms. The political role and significance of the mother, the uneasy relation between motherhood as gendered identity and mothering as daily practice, continue to be contentious issues for feminists (Rich 1976, DiQuinzio 1999, Gumbs, Martens and Williams 2016, Naber 2021). Mother-activists have historically constructed public issues from their personal experiences of suffering and loss within family structures (Reiger 2000), utilizing the symbolic power of motherhood in order to motivate others to join their causes (Logsdon Conradsen 2011). Notwithstanding, campaigns such those of the Argentinian Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo have been cast as ‘trapped by a bad script’ (Taylor 1997), that is as reproducing the same narratives of familialism and heteropatriarchal bloodline that underpin the narrative of the state. Conversely, many feminist scholars have argued that the political mobilisation of the trope of the mother has the potential to challenge the ‘official’ frameworks of national, ethnic or other group loyalty and to undermine or to radically reframe these very narratives (Kim 2020, Athanasiou 2017, Carreon and Moghadam 2015). For example, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo have raised the slogan ‘One child, all the children’ (Sosa 2014), taking the campaign beyond limits of blood kinship.

*CFP* "HANDMAIDS' AND AUNT'S TALES: LEARNING FROM ATWOOD ABOUT RESISTING GILEADS FICTIONAL AND REAL", EDITED COLLECTION

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale has become in recent years increasingly prescient, as large swaths of our world have become ever more like Gilead, the dystopia it depicts in the body of the novel, and increasingly aspirational, as we pine for the opportunity to mirror Gilead’s downfall, as acknowledged in its “Historical Notes.” Bruce Miller’s provocative television adaptation, having visualized in its first season Gilead’s establishment and early years, has moved since to flesh out the early years leading to its demise. Atwood’s long-awaited sequel, The Testaments, which appeared less than a month after season three’s finale, offers us now an overall blueprint. As we await season four, to appear sometime next year, and a promised adaptation of The Testaments eventually, we do well to wonder what in Atwood’s and Miller’s developing narrative may help us to save ourselves from various slippery slopes to various real-life Gileads. 

“There are no sure-fire formulas” in resisting “totalitarianisms,” that is, Atwood reminds us, in The Testaments’ acknowledgements, “since very little in history is inevitable.” In the absence of silver bullets, that is, we take up whatever arms are at our disposal, however intangible they may be. Among these are the literary and visual arts, popular culture generally, on the assumption that however much they may be designed to please and entertain, their design cannot help but reflect the culture in which they are created, purport to serve. In this spirit, each chapter of the book will explore a broadly or specifically philosophical, political, or social lesson gleaned from the fictional resistance to Gilead that is at the core of Atwood and Miller’s developing narrative, with an eye to its actual or potential role in resisting real-life Gileads, now and in the future.

*CFP* “MOTHERS AND MOTHERHOOD: NEGOTIATING THE INTERNATIONAL AUDIO-VISUAL INDUSTRY.”, BOOK CHAPTERS

We are looking for abstracts for an edited collection, provisionally entitled Mothers and Motherhood: Negotiating the international audio- visual industry. This question of how women reconcile care-work with formal work and qualitative insights into mothers’ experiences in the audio -visual industry, is under-researched in international production studies literature; something that this collection seeks to address. Chapters will explore the gendered challenges facing mothers and the attempts they make to address those challenges in order to sustain their working lives.

Areas of inquiry could include, but are not limited to:

*CFP* “PREGNANCY AND THE MEDIA”, FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIES, 19.5 ISSUE

The broad expansion of the post-feminist media landscape of the past couple of decades brought about an increased visibility of spectacularised and idealised ideas of pregnancy – a romanticised “new momism” (Douglas and Michaels, 2004). Alongside these romanticised discourses, though, exist numerous examples of mediated pregnancies that sit outside of such glamorised and perfect representations of pregnancy. 

This context has also opened up new networked spaces for people to seek and offer support online in relation to pregnancy, as well as spaces to search for or share (self-)representations of pregnancy. 

The editors of Commentary and Criticism invite short essays that critically consider pregnancy and contemporary media.