Inaugural Session of the Motherhood and Religions Units

This paper examines alternative constructions of motherhood in Islamic traditions, focusing on the Prophet’s wives as “Mothers of the Believers” (ummahat al-mu’minin) and his daughter, Fatima, as “Mother of Her Father” (Umm Abiha). The Qur’an (33:6) grants the Prophet’s wives the title ummahat al-mu’minin, traditionally viewed as a juridical category restricting their remarriage. Though only Khadija was a biological mother of his children, their symbolic maternal status positioned them as key figures in shaping Islamic discourses on social reform and activism. Figures like Zainab bint Jahsh and Umm Salama played active roles in the prophetic mission, demonstrating maternal leadership in transforming social and communal norms. Fatima’s title Umm Abiha, often seen as an endearment, marks a radical redefinition of the prevalent paradigms of lineage and legacy. This paper argues that these women embody motherhood as resilience, reform, and activism, offering alternative maternal paradigms that extend beyond the normative. 

This paper will demonstrate that motherhood, as a social expectation and a social role, greatly shaped Chinese women’s religious lives in the Song (960–1279) . Because women’s life trajectories in pre-modern China were shaped by the expectation of motherhood, their religious practices and experiences were often informed by it—either by the need to fulfill it or the desire to escape it. The longing to experience motherhood motivated women to pray to different deities, while the desire to avoid it catapulted young women to become monastics. Similarly, solitary religious adepts also chose to reject motherhood. In addition, the religious practices and experiences of mothers were sometimes related to their maternal roles. Drawing on different sources such as the Record of the Listener, tomb epitaphs, and Miscellanies written by Songliterati, this paper seeks to underscore how motherhood, as a defining factor in Song women’s lives, regularly informed their religious choices.

This paper draw on the poetic and visceral power of an Aztec childbirth oration, displaced in a drama of the birth of Christianity, in order to counter masculinised, neutered, pacified, abstracted, co-opted and superseded dramas of 'birth'. The orator is an authoritative female voice, shifting between an older kinswoman, speaking on behalf of all generations forever, a midwife (an ‘artisan and crafstwomen of birth’), and the goddesses Cihuacoatl and Yohualticitl. Centre stage is the metamorphosis and ‘matrescence’ (Jones 2023) of the nascent mother, and a battle of birth on which the very world depends, as surely as it depends on the ongoing life of the sun. I use the energy of the oration to expose the queer displacements of birth in the Judeo-Christian tradition and 'secular' institutions of motherhood, and ask what our cultural imaginaries might look like if natality were not discarded as incidental--or feminist.

This paper interrogates the historical phenomenon of the foundling program administered by the Augustinian nuns of the Hôtel-Dieu in Quebec between 1800 and 1845 as the dense site of cooperative and collaborative maternal practices. As a point of confluence where disparate streams of maternal practice converge—biological motherhood, sacramental motherhood, nutritive motherhood, and spiritual motherhood—the foundling program provides a test case for interrogating the historical contingencies of motherhood. What does this case illuminate about nineteenth-century ideologies of motherhood and maternal practices? About the role of Catholic devotion and theology in shaping—or resisting—those ideologies and practices? What does it reveal about our own contemporary ideals of intensive mothering? What might taking seriously the phenomena of sacramental motherhood and spiritual motherhood add to our theoretical conceptions of both motherhood as institution and mothering as practice—and to the elaboration of maternal thinking as methodological approach to the study of religion?