ONLINE BOOKCLUB // Motherhood Between Theory & Fiction
Our bookclub used to be hybrid, however, due to its success, we felt it better to separate the online from the in person! We now have two bookclubs, one entirely online, and one entirely in person.
No. Attendees do not need to have purchased or fully read the texts in order to participate. Contextual summaries, key themes, excerpts, and guiding questions will be provided to help participants engage meaningfully regardless of reading capacity or access to materials.
Each month we pair: one fiction text with one non-fiction/theoretical text The aim is to explore how literature and critical theory speak to one another — allowing participants to think through complex ideas emotionally, politically, philosophically, and collectively.
Anyone interested in critically engaging with motherhood, care, reproduction, identity, labour, technology, kinship, feminism, philosophy, politics, literature, & culture. You do not need to identify as a mother or parent to attend. The space is intentionally inclusive.
Sessions are led and facilitated by Sandy Oldaker (@themotherresearcher), a philosophy researcher and artist working across motherhood studies, biopolitics, feminist theory, reproductive politics, and autoethnographic practice.
kinship and family structures, queer and trans reproductivity, capitalism and domestic labour, maternal affect and embodiment, medicalisation and biopolitics, futurity and speculative motherhood.
Links for online sessions are emailed to you on the day of the bookclub. Please contact is at info@themadreproject.com if you haven't received this.
ONLINE BOOKCLUB // motherhood between theory & fiction
Due to the unprecidented success of our dual-reading bookclub at The Madre Project, we have now divided our sessions making one online & one in person.
This is a critical reading group exploring motherhood, reproduction, care, labour and identity through dual reading. Each session pairs fiction with critical theory, philosophy, memoir, or cultural criticism — creating space to think collectively about the maternal beyond sentimentality and stereotype.
Led and facilitated by @themotherresearcher; Sandy is founder of The Madre Project & a lecturer in philosophy at The University of Chichester, where she is researching a PhD on the biopolitics of motherhood.
In our third session we’ll read Sylvia Federici’s seminal essay Wages Against Housework alongside Caro Claire Burke’s contemporary novel Yesteryear. Both works have provoked polarising responses for almost opposing reasons. Together, they invite us to look beneath the romanticised image of motherhood and the home, asking what happens when the labour that sustains family life is sentimentalised. What can fiction reveal about the political argument, and what might Federici’s theory allow us to see differently in Burke’s novel?
Each book club meeting is open to all. Breaking down barriers to gathering, and bringing together people of diverse caring identities is at the heart of The Madre Project mission. At checkout please select the suggested exhange amount if you can afford to - this supports our work as a nonprofit CIC. Alternatively, please pay as you can PAYC - in line with our philosophy that finances should never be a barrier to partcipation.