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During the 49th AEDEAN Conference, which will take place November 18-20 of 2026 in Castelló de la Plana, part of our MILA team will be presenting a roundtable in the Feminist & Gender Studies panel. In this roundtable, members Ana Fernández-Caparrós Turina, Laura Arce Álvarez, Natalia Rodriguez Nieto. and Lucía Arejula Muñoz will elaborate on the matrifocal details of the project through their diverse areas of expertise. Titled 'Writing and Performing Motherhood in Contemporary Anglophone Literature: Reclaiming Sites of Textual Liberation', the roundtable will offer room for debate on how literature has portrayed diverse maternal experiences over centuries and genres. 

A short overview of our roundtable: 

The past decades have seen an extraordinary surge in novels, poem collections, theatre plays and biographical writing that put motherhood on the literary map in an unprecedented way, claiming a space within the literary domain that, before the 1970s, was difficult to find. The proliferation of maternal narratives in women’s writing was particularly intense over the last decade, so much that in a 2018 article published in Paris Review, Lauren Elkin asked “Why All the Books about Mother?” The following round table aims at assessing this phenomenon, analyzing how matrifocal narratives work and opening up a debate about how the complex and vast experience of motherhood is currently written and described without being pathologized. According to critic Elizabeth Podnieks, “matrifocal literatures are written and narrated by mothers in the first-person or limited third-person voice, rendering maternal identity and experience from subjective perspectives. Further, they (re) value the significance and meaning of maternal figures in cultural, social, and national arenas, and often contest or negotiate traditional ideologies of the “good” mother as self-sacrificing, nurturing, and sexless with her antithesis, the “bad” mother” (176). Also, Podnieks considers matrifocal literatures as “sites of textual liberation where women self-consciously and outspokenly chart, confront, debate, and celebrate maternal feelings, practices, bodies, and identities” (176). Taking Podnieks’ definition as a starting point, the speakers in this roundtable will discuss texts that challenge the institution of motherhood in literature, therefore proposing a revision of Adrienne Rich’s groundbreaking work Of Woman Born (1976) by analyzing the evolution of mothering, motherhood, maternal roles and new types of family as presented in the recent maternal canon or by revising modern classics from the critical perspectives opened up by the field of Motherhood Studies. The results presented in this roundtable are framed within the wider research carried out for the funded research project “Intersectional Maternities and New Forms of Family in Anglophone Literature” (PID2024-160004OB-100). By applying a feminist and intersectional perspective connecting maternity with race, gender, nationality, sexuality, class and age, the contributions in this round table would like to encourage debate on the cultural work of contemporary fiction in disentangling motherhood from the ideological structures that have traditionally shaped it. How do literary texts open up spaces for the articulation of maternal identities that challenge persistent cultural expectations for mothers? Can matrifocal narratives help destigmatization of maternal practices that deviate from enduring patriarchal models? 

Six of our team members (Laura Arce Álvarez, Eulalia Piñero Gil, Gala Arias Rubio, Anna Brígido Corachán, Ana Fernández Caparrós and Lucía Aréjula Muñoz) took part in the 36th Biennial Conference of EAAS held at the University of Bologna from September 1st to September 4th. There, a panel on motherhood studies was presented where diverse mothering structures and maternal figures were analyzed. The proposals offered by our researchers provided those attending with an intersectional view of how maternal practices have been carried out in different centuries, cultures and communities. 

• Eulalia Piñero Gil, Universidad Autónoma De Madrid - Kate Chopin’s “Désirée’s Baby” and the Experience of Immigration and Transracial Motherhood in the Antebellum American South

• Ana Fernández-Caparrós, Universitat De València - Visions of (Limited) Freedom: Grounded Mothers on the Twenty-First-Century American Stage

• María Laura Arce Álvarez, Universidad Autónoma De Madrid - Recolonizing the Maternal Body: Matrifocal Narratives of Exclusion in Joanne Ramos’ The Farm

• Gala Arias Rubio, Universidad Autónoma De Madrid - ‘We Will Be Your Mothers, Your Sisters, Your Daughters.’ Motherhood, Slavery and Liberation in Four Ways To Forgiveness (1995) by Ursula K. Le Guin

• Anna M. Brígido-Corachán, Universitat De València - Poets, Warriors, Mothers: Fluid Becoming, Embodied Sovereignty, and Intergenerational Healing in Contemporary Native American Poetry

• Lucía Aréjula Múñoz, Universidad Autónoma De Madrid - The Queer Mothering Vision: Detransition Baby and its Testing of the Limits of Freedom

• Foteini Toliou, Aristotéleio Panepistī́ Mio Thessaloníkīs - Sexual Freedom and Affective Citizenship for Jamaican Immigrant Mothers in New York City in Nicole Dennis-Benn’s Novel Patsy (2019)

Held at the University of London and organized by the London Centre of Interdisciplinary Research, the International Conference "Discourses on Motherhood" represents one of the most important matrifocal events of the year. This conference is inagurated this year with a plenary talk by Andrea O'Reilly, considered one of the founding scholars of mothering theories, and two members of MILA will be contributing to this matri-oriented agenda by stressing literature's importance in motherhood studies.  

Their panel will be coordinated by chair Emma Domínguez-Rué, and their papers are as follows:

• Elisa Fernández Rodríguez, Autonomous University of Madrid (Spain) "The Mother-Daughter Divide: Maternal Relationships in Contemporary US Latinx Fiction"

• María Laura Arce Álvarez, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain) "Maternal Refugeetude and the Mother-Son Relationship in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous" 

Besides, this conference presented itself as an opportunity to establish contact with other well-known matrifocal researchers, as it is the case of Andrea O'Reilly who has been working unceasingly in mothering studies. 

During the MESEA 14th Biennial Conference, two of our project members participated in a full matrifocal pannel titled "Revisiting Motherhood: Matrifocal Narratives with an Environmental and More-than-Human Focus" where they incorporated MILA's objectives into the ecocritical vision that MESEA proposed this year. Our PI, Laura Arce, was the chair of this pannel where three fundamental papers were included:

• Gala Arias Rubio (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain), "The Wolf Woman and the Mother Wolf"

• Mª Isabel Pérez-Ramos (University of Oviedo, Spain), "From Motherhood to Pollination: and EcoNarratological Analysis of Barbara Litkowski’s “Monarch Blue”"

• María Laura Arce (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain), "Queer Mothering and Nature in Carmen María Machado’s Short Story “Mothers”" 

Aditionally, another member of MILA, Anna Brígido-Corachán moderated as chair another pannel titled "Indigenous Biospheres: Relational Ontologies, Intergenerational Solidarity, and Earth-centered Perspectives in Contemporary Native American Literature" where she also presented her paper "“From the Birthing Waters to Air”: Transcorporeality and Environmental Ethics in the Poetry of Linda Hogan and Ofelia Zepeda". 

In the first edition of the MIRCAALT Young Scholars Doctoral Seminar, a panel on motherhood studies was conducted. There, several mothering schema and family structures were discussed which contributed to the creation of fruitful conversations on mother-daughter relationships, space for queer mothers in fiction and literary formats that matrifocal narratives adopt. 

MILA entered the annual Conference organized by PopMeC, the Association for US Popular Culture Studies, through the contributions of two of our young researchers. In both papers, our members proposed an analysis of two contemporary novels through matrifocal lenses, paying close attention to the fictional maternal figures and their practices.

• Aréjula Muñoz, Lucía. "The "ongoing song of care" in Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts or how to queer the mothering frontier" Frontiers and Un/Belongings in US American Culture, Universidad de Valladolid. November 24-26, 2025. 

• Fernández Rodríguez, Elisa. "The Revolution Begins at Home: Notions of Un/Belonging(s) in Carla Trujillo's What Night Brings" Frontiers and Un/Belongings in US American Culture, Universidad de Valladolid. November 24-26, 2025. 

In the 48th AEDEAN Conference, the objectives of our project were transmited through two matrifocal interventions that paid attention, among other issues related to motherhood studies, to the mothering exerted by fictional trans women. This focus coincides with the intersectional perspective that our project seeks to explore in matrifocal narratives. 

• Aréjula Muñoz, Lucía. "Of Trans Mothers and Daughters: Mothering Practices in The House of Impossible Beauties and Bad Girls" 48th AEDEAN Conference, Universidad del País Vasco. November 12-14, 2025. 

• Fernández Rodríguez, Elisa. "Women and Waste, Bodies and Borders: Sylvia Aguilar Zeleny's Trash" 48th AEDEAN Conference, Universidad del País Vasco. November 12-14, 2025.