Long associated with an experience perceived as natural, universal, and constitutive of female identity, motherhood has recently become the subject of critical re-evaluation in literary studies, feminist studies, and maternal studies. The notions of matrescence, maternal subjectivity, and maternal experience have shifted attention from normative representations of the mother toward the complex experience of becoming a mother, understood in its bodily, psychological, affective, relational, and socio-political dimensions.

In Francophone literatures, motherhood has emerged as a privileged site for exploring transformations of the self and changing relationships to the body, sexuality, the child, the partner, and the social world. Experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, and the postpartum period coexist with narratives of maternal ambivalence, psychological vulnerability, refusal of motherhood, infertility, and perinatal grief. Increasingly numerous literary works devoted to these experiences challenge cultural norms and imaginaries surrounding motherhood while simultaneously renewing the narrative forms and languages through which such experiences may be expressed.

For this thematic issue of Romanica Silesiana (Vol. 33, No. 1/2028), we invite contributions exploring representations of motherhood and non-motherhood in Francophone literatures, with particular attention to experiences of becoming a mother, the relationships shaped by motherhood, and the aesthetic forms through which these experiences are represented.

Possible thematic areas (non-exhaustive)

Contributions from various disciplinary backgrounds and methodological approaches are welcome and may address, among others, the following topics:

• matrescence, becoming a mother, maternal subjectivity, and identity transformations;
• representations of pregnancy, childbirth, and the postpartum period;
• the maternal body, bodily transformations, self-image, and somatic experiences of motherhood;
• maternal mental health: vulnerability, ambivalence, mental load, exhaustion, and postpartum depression;
• mother–child relationships;
• motherhood, conjugality, parenthood, and couple dynamics;
• maternal sexuality, desire, pleasure, and representations of the sexualized maternal body;
• tensions between motherhood, autonomy, and personal fulfilment;
• social, cultural, and political injunctions related to motherhood;
• refusal of motherhood and the choice of non-motherhood;
• alternatives to dominant models of parenthood;
• infertility, sterility, and reproductive journeys;
• voluntary termination of pregnancy and literary representations of abortion;
• pregnancy loss, perinatal death, and reproductive grief;
• motherhood, care, and the ethics of relationality;
• maternal figures in autobiography, autofiction, and life writing;
• maternal voices, testimony, and forms of self-expression;
• poetics, language, narrative forms, and literary representations of motherhood and non-motherhood;
• feminist, intersectional, psychoanalytic, decolonial, and ecocritical approaches to motherhood and non-motherhood.

Proposals in French or English, including an abstract of approximately 300 words and a short biographical note, should be sent by 30 September 2026 to: agnieszka.loska@us.edu.pl

For stylesheet details, please visit:

https://journals.us.edu.pl/index.php/RS/about/submissions

Important dates:

30 September 2026: submission of proposals (abstract and short biographical note);

15 October 2026: notification of acceptance;

31 January 2027: submission of full articles;

April 2027: completion of double-blind peer review;

June 2027: submission of revised and final versions of articles;

June 2028: online publication of the issue on the Romanica Silesiana website.

On behalf of the Editorial Board of Romanica Silesiana:
Agnieszka Loska, Editor
Faculty of Humanities
Institute of Literary Studies
University of Silesia in Katowice (Poland)