In recent decades, popular culture - from television and film to newspapers, magazines, and best-selling fiction - has focused an enormous amount of attention on mothers.\\Through feminist, psychoanalytic, sociological, literary, and cultural studies perspectives, the twenty chapters in this book examine an array of current and relevant contemporary topics related to maternal identities such as working, stay-at-home, ambivalent, absent, good, bad, single, teen, elder, celebrity, and lesbian mothers; and issues such as the mommy wars, self-care, pregnancy, abortion, contraception, infanticide, adoption, sex and sexuality, breastfeeding, post-partum depression, fertility, genetics, and reproductive technologies. Contributors from Canada, the United States, Britain, and Australia engage critically and theoretically with stereotypes perpetuated by popular culture media, and chart some of the provocative and liberating ways that we can use and interpret this media to encourage and promote alternative and transformative maternal readings, identities, and practices. \\Mediating Moms looks at mothers as imaged by and in the media; how mothers mediate or negotiate these images according to their historical, corporeal, and lived personhoods; and how scholars mediate the popular and academic discourses of motherhood as a way of registering, strengthening, and alleviating the tensions between representation and reality.\\Mediating Moms engages critically with stereotypes perpetuated by popular culture, while mapping some of the provocative and liberating ways that mothers can use the media to transform and reaffirm their identities.

Introduction: Popular culture's maternal embrace / Elizabeth Podnieks -- Mommy nearest: TV for preschoolers and the search for the good enough (working) mother / Stephanie Wardrop -- "Won't somebody think of the children?": The nineties subversion of the animated mother / Jo Johnson -- Real(ity) TV practices of surveillance: evaluating mothers in Supernanny and Crash test mommy / Fiona Joy Green -- "The bump is back": celebrity moms, entertainment journalism, and the "media mother police" / Elizabeth Podnieks -- Are you a politician or a mother? / Jennifer Bell -- Motherhood, murder, and the media: Joanne Hayes and the Kerry babies case / Nicola Goc -- "Shit and string beans," boredom and babies: bad mothers in popular women's fiction since 1968 / Imelda Whelehan -- Mothering across generations: L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables at 100 / Irene Gammel -- "You have to take it and own it": Yo' Mama magazine as a space of refusal for teenage mothers / Beth O'Connor -- Mediating risky motherhood: a discursive analysis of offline and online responses to the oldest British mother-to-be / Maud Perrier -- And now, the breast of the story: realistic portrayals of breastfeeding in contemporary television / Kathryn Pallister -- Watch them suffer, watch them die: depictions of African mothers and motherhood in famine footage and in Fernando Meirelles's The constant gardener / H. Louise Davis -- The reality of TV labour: Birth stories / Dominique Russell -- Mothering in the middle and self-care: just one more thing to do / Debra Langan -- S/Kin of virtual mothers: loss and mourning on a Korean birthmothers' website / Hosu Kim -- Fostering the passive maternal experience: language and prescription in the What to expect series of maternity literature / Sally Mennill -- Motherhood, prime-time TV, and Grey's anatomy / Latham Hunter -- Tom vs. Brooke: or postpartum depression as bad mothering in popular culture / Jocelyn Fenton Stitt -- Other mothers: looking at maternal desire in The l word / Lenora Perry-Jamaniego -- Coming to terms: ethics, motherhood, and the cultural science fiction of the gene / Stuart J. Murray.