This session explores the intersections of motherhood, material religion, political agency and the negotiation of status through three case studies spanning Latin American devotional practice, transnational maternal activism, and embodiment in early Islam. These papers challenge normative constructions of motherhood by examining Guadalupan altarcitos as sites of epistemological authority, headscarves as vehicles of political resistance among South Korean and Argentine mothers, and enslaved African mothers’ strategic negotiation of status through sons in early Islam.
In this paper, I offer an analysis of altarcitos devoted to Our Lady of Guadalupe as an act of futuring rooted in the material religious practices of Mexican American women. I link altars to mothering in how this material practice communicates a maternal “care perspective” that refuses to reproduce harmful structures and sheds light on the epistemological authority of Mexican American women, affirming their role as propagators of cultural values, religious belief/practice, and traditions among their communities.
This paper examines how transnational Catholic mothers mobilized motherhood as material religion through the embodied practice of wearing headscarves in public protest—purple for South Korean Minkahyup mothers of political victims under authoritarian regimes and white for Argentine Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. This paper unearths a historically significant moment of transnational encounter in June 1994 in South Korea, when Minkahyup invited the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo into solidarity activism in South Korea’s gwangjang (public square). I argue that the headscarves that the mothers wore in public protest functioned as portable “altars” of counter-memory: sensory, visible, and repeatable artifacts that resignified traditional motherhood into a moral vocation of political resistance, oriented toward justice, truth, and restoration of human dignity. In this paper, the headscarf is not a mere symbol but a lived religious practice that operates at the intersection of devotion, grief, and moral agency.
What do Hājar and women such as Sumayya, Umm Ayman, Fizza, and the enslaved concubine mothers (umm walad) of several Shiʿi Imams have in common? Across Islamic narrative traditions, these women appear as enslaved women of African origin whose maternal labor contributed to the birthing and sustaining of influential male figures who shaped Islamic thought, ritual, and sectarian memory. Yet while the authority of their sons is preserved in historical and genealogical records, the mothers themselves appear only briefly in the archive. Sumayya is remembered primarily through the later prominence of her son Ammār b. Yāsir; Umm Ayman appears in sources that emphasize her transfer as property alongside her role in raising the Prophet; and the enslaved mothers of Imams are preserved mainly in genealogical lists. This paper argues that even where historical narratives fall silent, ritual practice and communal memory continue to bear the imprint of their maternal labor.