Mediated Maternity

This book explores the cultural construction of the bad mother in books, movies, and TV shows, arguing that these portrayals typically have the effect of cementing dominant assumptions about motherhood in place—or, less often, of disrupting those assumptions, causing us to ask whether motherhood could be constructed differently.

Linda Seidel

Acknowledgments Introduction: Mediated Motherhood Part I: The Nancy Grace Effect Chapter 1. Nancy Grace and the Motherhood Critics Chapter 2. Neonaticide in Nancy Grace and Jodi Picoult Part II: Working-Class Mothers in White and Black Chapter 3. Gone Baby Gone: Reproducing the Bad Mother Chapter 4. Stereotyping the Black Welfare Mother in Precious Part III: Alienated Maternity in White Professional Women Chapter 5. Creating the Reality of Postpartum Depression in Shields' Down Came the Rain and Morton's Breakable You Chapter 6. Glenn Close and the Monstrous Maternal: Mothers and Daughters in Damages Epilogue: Motherhood in Context References