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What happens when mothers defy expectations, refuse prescribed roles, or openly challenge the ideal of the good, righteous mother? Mother Outlaws examines contemporary Italian literature through narratives of resistance, ambivalence, and radical creativity. Drawing on feminist thinkers and motherhood scholars such as Adrienne Rich and Andrea O’Reilly, the course foregrounds maternal figures who disrupt normative models of femininity and contest patriarchal, nationalist, and pronatalist ideologies. In contemporary Italy, motherhood constitutes a highly charged cultural and political terrain. While conservative and populist discourses elevate the “righteous” mother to a moral, civic, and national ideal, feminist perspectives critically interrogate the social, political, emotional, and activist dimensions of maternal experience. The course approaches mothering as the “unresolved question of feminism,” tracing a trajectory from second-wave struggles for reproductive autonomy — often shaped by matriphobia — to current debates on maternal subjectivity, ambivalence, and the pressures of intensive mothering.
Students will engage with key theoretical frameworks that position motherhood as a radical feminist issue, acquiring conceptual and methodological tools to analyze how post-2000 Italian literature imagines, negotiates, and rewrites maternal figures. Through the close reading of two short novels read in full — The Choice by Orsola Severini and The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante — alongside selected excerpts from contemporary authors, the course explores themes such as monstrous motherhood, queer and non-biological kinship, reproductive loss and justice, and the cultural scripts that regulate maternal identities, practices, and voices. Critical and creative practice is central to the module. Students will experiment with matricritical reading, scene rewriting, book review writing, and the preparation of an author interview, developing a transdisciplinary and embodied understanding of how contemporary Italian literature articulates, contests, and reinvents mothering in ways that are both provocative and generative.
No prior knowledge of Italian language or culture is required: all texts will be read in English translation. The module is designed as an inclusive, discussion-based learning environment in which students are encouraged to engage openly and thoughtfully with complex, sensitive, and sometimes challenging material, in a classroom atmosphere that prioritizes intellectual curiosity, mutual respect, and care.
Learning Outcomes By the end of the module, students will be able to: 1. Critically analyze motherhood as a social, political, and cultural construct in contemporary Italian literature. 2. Identify and evaluate narrative strategies that resist or complicate dominant maternal ideologies. 3. Examine and compare maternal representations across genres, from autofiction to the family novel. 4. Situate literary portrayals of motherhood within transnational feminist debates, connecting Italian texts to global contexts. 5. Produce informed responses, both critical and creative, to literary representations of mothering, demonstrating engagement with theory and textual analysis. |
