This open access volume offers original essays on how motherhood and mothering are represented in contemporary fiction and life writing across several national contexts. Providing a broad range of perspectives in terms of geopolitical places, thematic concerns, and theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches, it demonstrates the significance of literary narratives for understanding and critiquing motherhood and mothering as social phenomena and subjective experiences. The chapters contextualize motherhood and mothering in terms of their particular national and cultural location and analyze narratives about mothers who are firmly placed in one national context, as well as those who are in "in-between" positions due to migrant experiences. The contributions foreground and link together the themes central to the volume: embodied experience and maternal embodiment; notions of what is "normal" or natural (or not) about motherhood; maternal health and illness; mother-daughter relations; maternality and memory; and the (im)possibilities of giving voice to the mother. They raise questions about how motherhood and mothering are marked by absence and/or presence, as well as by profound ambivalences.

This book speaks to the meanings and values that inhere in close relations, focusing on 'family' and 'kinship' but also looking beyond these categories. Multifaceted, diverse and subject to constant debate, close relations are ubiquitous in human lives on embodied as well as symbolic levels. Closely related to processes of power, legibility and recognition, close relations are surrounded by boundaries that both constrain and enable their practical, symbolical and legal formation. Carefully contextualising close relations in relation to different national contexts, but also in relation to gender, sexuality, race, religion and dis/ability, the volume points to the importance of and variations in how close relations are lived, understood and negotiated. Grounded in a number of academic areas and disciplines, ranging from legal studies, sociology and social work to literary studies and ethnology, this volume also highlights the value of using inter- and multidisciplinary scholarly approaches in research about close relations. Chapter 11 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This volume explores which relations produce or maintain masculinities and certain gendered systems of power and the consequences of these gender constructions that further gender research. To understand the meanings of masculinity/masculinities and relationalities as critical concepts in gender studies it takes a wide theoretical grip that spans over several research fields. From a feminist perspective, it critically investigates masculinities as relationally constructed by scrutinizing which relations construct masculinity within a certain gendered system of power, such as the nation, the family, or the workplace, and explores how this is done. 'In relation to what?' is hence, in spite of its almost vulgar rhetorical simplicity, an important question in investigating and problematizing gender.

This open access volume offers original essays on how motherhood and mothering are represented in contemporary fiction and life writing across several national contexts. Providing a broad range of perspectives in terms of geopolitical places, thematic concerns, and theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches, it demonstrates the significance of literary narratives for understanding and critiquing motherhood and mothering as social phenomena and subjective experiences. The chapters contextualize motherhood and mothering in terms of their particular national and cultural location and analyze narratives about mothers who are firmly placed in one national context, as well as those who are in "in-between" positions due to migrant experiences. The contributions foreground and link together the themes central to the volume: embodied experience and maternal embodiment; notions of what is "normal" or natural (or not) about motherhood; maternal health and illness; mother-daughter relations; maternality and memory; and the (im)possibilities of giving voice to the mother. They raise questions about how motherhood and mothering are marked by absence and/or presence, as well as by profound ambivalences.

This volume explores which relations produce or maintain masculinities and certain gendered systems of power and the consequences of these gender constructions that further gender research. To understand the meanings of masculinity/masculinities and relationalities as critical concepts in gender studies it takes a wide theoretical grip that spans over several research fields. From a feminist perspective, it critically investigates masculinities as relationally constructed by scrutinizing which relations construct masculinity within a certain gendered system of power, such as the nation, the family, or the workplace, and explores how this is done. 'In relation to what?' is hence, in spite of its almost vulgar rhetorical simplicity, an important question in investigating and problematizing gender.