Single Mothering as Critique and Vision

“Single Mothering as Critique and Vision,” is a roundtable session on single mothering as an ethical, theological, philosophical, and historical act from which to challenge contemporary systems and theories of social reproduction and to imagine alternatives. We ask what it means to single mother under white supremacist heteropatriarchy and capitalist ableism. Single mothering serves as a binary breaker against the hierarchies constructed under contemporary systems of social reproduction: mother/whore, straight/queer, independent/dependent, mature/immature, able/disabled, and productive/unproductive. Hence, rather than the single mother representing lack, we offer theological, theoretical, and religious visions of single mothering as a force for more just approaches to social reproduction. Scholars have long pointed out the gendered, raced, and classed dynamics of care labor, and offered alternative visions of family. However, lacunae exist in terms of single mothering as a theological, theoretical, and political frame. This roundtable addresses this absence.