[csaa-forum] Matrescence symposium | 17 July 2025 | Call for abstracts

[Laura Roberts]

Matrescence symposium | Call for abstracts

We invite abstracts for papers and/or panels to be presented at a one-day, hybrid symposium (online and at The University of Queensland, Brisbane City campus, Australia) on Thursday 17 July 2025 exploring the broad theme of ‘matrescence’.

Matrescence – a term coined by medical anthropologist Dana Raphael in the 1970s – describes the period of becoming a mother. The term’s use signifies that, like the period of adolescence (the transition from childhood to adulthood), becoming a mother is an emotionally, socially, physiologically, spiritually, and politically complex experience that brings both transient and irreversible changes.

The notion of matrescence is gaining in popular attention among mothers and those working in the realm of maternal wellbeing, though the experiences of conception, pregnancy, labour, birth, and early maternity are sorely lacking in cultural and scholarly attention in the West. This silence has vast implications for maternal, infant, and family wellbeing but also much more broadly – socially, culturally, economically, and politically.

Public discourse around matrescence and early motherhood often centres the challenges or limiting factors of maternity and tends to pathologise or medicalise matrescence (focusing on phenomena such as postpartum depression and anxiety, for example). While illuminating the challenges of maternity is undoubtedly important, there is comparably little public discourse that explores the wider breadth of maternal experience and insights that can occur during the period of becoming a mother.

Some areas of feminist scholarship, especially since the 1970s, have given much attention to the position of the mother and maternity as well as the mother-child relationship. Adrienne Rich’s landmark book Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, for example, draws an important distinction between the social, cultural, and political limitations placed on mothers by the ‘institution of motherhood’ and the expansive and positive potentialities of the experience of mothering. Within Western philosophy, one of the most significant contributions of French poststructuralist feminist thought was the identification and criticism of the denigrated and silenced position of the mother in Western thought and culture. Key figures in this intellectual movement such as Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, and Julia Kristeva have had a profound impact on feminist theorising and political movements by bringing the figure of the mother into view. Irigaray, for example, diagnosed the cultural ‘matricide’ that, she claims, underpins Western philosophy and culture, and calls for it to be remedied through creating the conditions for the mother to be recognised as a speaking subject.

Building on this tradition, Michelle Boulous Walker’s Philosophy and the Maternal Body: Reading Silence – a key text on maternity and philosophy – interrogates the silencing of the feminine voice in Western thought and suggests new ways of articulating the maternal body and women’s experience of pregnancy and motherhood. Adrianna Cavarero’s In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy draws philosophical attention specifically to the category of birth as a way of challenging and countering the disproportionate attention (both implicit and explicit) given to the category of death – on which, she argues, traditional Western philosophy has been based. There is growing philosophical interest in birth, demonstrated by an increasing number of titles, conferences, and symposia framed around this theme.

Angela Davis and bell hooks raise crucial questions relating to race and class in thinking philosophically about motherhood. bell hooks, in “Revolutionary Parenting” (Feminist theory: From Margin to Center [1984]), reminds us of the failures of some feminist thinkers to appreciate the intersections of race and class in their analyses – particularly relating to motherhood and work. For example, hooks notes that, in the mid- to late-twentieth century, feminist thinking on motherhood that demanded acknowledgement for housework and childcare actually alienated many working-class women and/or women of colour who found parenting an affirming interpersonal relationship as well as an escape from the world of alienating work in the labour market. Davis, in Women, Race and Class (1981), offers a similar critique of this problem and argues that rather than ‘Wages for Housework’ we should recognise the revolutionary potential of, for example, a universal basic income or subsidised public childcare.

Beyond the field of philosophy, there has been expanding scholarly interest in themes relating to maternity in what is often described as the broad field of maternal studies. Andrea O’Reilly’s work has been central to the development of this field and her work has informed scholarly interest in maternity and ‘matricentric feminism’ (in fields such as sociology, history, the arts, and economics) globally, including in Australia. O’Reilly also gives significant attention to the experiences of mothers in academia, especially in North America, providing frameworks to analyse the ways in which women’s experiences as scholars are shaped and limited by their experiences as mothers and vice versa, drawing attention to structural factors underpinning these patterns. There is much less scholarship analysing these patterns in academic contexts outside North America.

Despite this scholarly interest in the themes of maternity and birth, there remains comparably little scholarship interrogating the period of becoming a mother. However, we consider this phenomenon worthy of serious intellectual attention and suggest that its careful analysis can have broad philosophical, sociological, political, cultural, and economic implications.

The notion of matrescence introduces many complex questions for both theoretical and empirical inquiry. We are therefore calling for abstracts for papers and/or panels that explore these questions with the intention of inspiring new and renewed scholarly interest in the topics of matrescence and maternity.

We are especially interested in papers that explore this theme from within the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, though welcome papers from other disciplines as well as interdisciplinary research. Papers can follow a conventional academic format or be experimental or creative in expression. We hope this event will garner new connections and collaborations among both emerging and established scholars working in this area, and we aim to collate research presented at the symposium in a special issue of a Q1 journal.

Potential areas of consideration include but are not limited to:

  *   Matrescence and Australian universities – experiences of academics and students

  *   Matrescence and philosophy

  *   Matrescence and rewriting mother-child relations

  *   First Nations experiences of and perspectives on matrescence

  *   Decolonial perspectives on matrescence

  *   How matrescence is shaped by intersecting experiences of class, race, ability, sexuality, and other social and identity markers

  *   The devaluation of mothering, care, and reproductive labour in early motherhood

  *   Economic factors influencing matrescence, such as poverty, financial dependence, paid and unpaid parental leave, returning to paid work, experiences of formal and informal childcare, etc.

  *   Queer experiences of and perspectives on matrescence

  *   Phenomenology of matrescence

  *   Matrescence and the media

  *   Matrescence and technology

  *   Matrescence and infant loss

  *   Matrescence and adoption

Symposium details:

Thursday 17 July 2025 | The University of Queensland, Brisbane City campus (308 Queen St, Brisbane city) and online.

There will be no fee to attend the symposium.

We are happy to be able to provide two $200 travel bursaries to support HDR students and/or early-career/unwaged researchers to attend the symposium. Please indicate if you would like to be considered for a bursary when submitting your abstract and include a brief outline of why the bursary would be beneficial.

This symposium is supported by funding gratefully received by the Australian Women’s and Gender Studies Association (AWGSA).

Organising committee: Dr Belinda Eslick (The University of Queensland), Dr Fabiane Ramos (University of Southern Queensland), and Dr Laura Roberts (Flinders University)

Please submit a 200-word abstract and short bio by 17:00 (AEST) Tuesday 17 June 2025 to: matrescence.symposium at gmail.com<mailto:matrescence.symposium at gmail.com>

Please also indicate whether you would like to attend online or in person, and if you would like to be considered for an HDR/ECR travel bursary.


Dr Laura Roberts  | Women’s and Gender Studies  | Flinders University | Australia
e: laura.roberts at flinders.edu.au<mailto:laura.roberts at flinders.edu.au>
w: https://www.flinders.edu.au/people/laura.roberts
w: https://flinders.academia.edu/lauraroberts
t: @BrisPhiloSophia<https://twitter.com/BrisPhiloSophia>

Recent Publications:
*Roberts, L (2023) “Smart Feminist Cities: The Case of Barcelona en Comú”<https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111051802-015/html> in Women Philosophers on Economics, Technology, Environment and Gender History: Shaping the Future, Rethinking the Past.
*Roberts, L (2023)  “Returning to Irigaray’s Radical Materialism: Sexuate Difference, Ontology and Bodies of Water” in What is sexual difference?: Thinking with Irigaray.
*Roberts, L. (2022) ‘Sexuate Difference, Sovereignty and Colonialism: Reading Luce Irigaray with Irene Watson<https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11841-022-00924-1>’, Sophia
*Ramos, F. and Roberts, L. (2021) ‘Wonder as Feminist Pedagogy: Disrupting Feminist Complicity with Coloniality’<https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01417789211013702>, Feminist Review
*Roberts, L. (2019) Irigaray and Politics <https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-irigaray-and-politics.html>  (Edinburgh University Press)
I acknowledge the Kaurna people as the traditional custodians of the lands on which I live and work. I pay my respects to Elders past and present. Sovereignty has never been ceded.

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