CO-SPONSORSHIP: Motherhood and Religions Unit and Religion and Food Unit
Nourishing Futures: Motherhood, Food, and Religion
The Motherhood and Religions Unit and the Food and Religion Unit invite proposals for a joint session exploring how the intertwined realms of motherhood and food practices shape religious communities, identities, and imagined futures. Food is a central site through which religious meaning, ethical formation, and cultural continuity are enacted, and mothers often act as the primary religious enculturators in this regard, through feeding, withholding, preparing, cultivating, sharing food, and passing on culinary and dietary traditions to maintain the continuity and future of the community. Foodways, as implemented by those who perform mother work for individuals and communities, also serve as powerful arenas of regulation, resistance, risk, and hope.
This session seeks papers that examine how religious traditions envision futures through maternal nourishment practices, dietary rules, prohibitions, and the transmission of food-related knowledge. We are especially interested in studies that highlight the material and embodied aspects of food and motherhood, asking how these practices sustain or unsettle inherited narratives of belonging, hierarchy, purity, gender, or kinship.
Topics may include:
- Maternal teaching of religious food systems: how children learn to inhabit food rules, taboos, and ethical or ritual foodways (such as selecting licit food, doing food offerings, fasting, etc.)
- Fasting, fattening, or food-based rites of preparation for motherhood
- Pregnancy food avoidances, cravings, and taboos as religious or spiritual practices
- Breastfeeding, human or other-than-human lactation, and maternal nourishment in religious traditions
- Embodied forms of care (growing, harvesting, preparing, or distributing food) as sites of ethical formation or spiritual responsibility
- How histories of scarcity, abundance, and ecological precarity shape maternal food practices and imagined futures
- Methodological and theoretical approaches to futuring in relation to motherhood, food, and religious community-making
- Seeds and growing things; generativity
- Creation and care, in particular Indigenous creation and care