Motherhood in the context of homeland security culture is a site of intense contestation—both a powerful form of currency and a target of unprecedented assault. In this book, I designate the term homeland maternity in order to theorize the relationship between motherhood and nation in US homeland security culture. While scholars of rhetoric, feminist, and cultural studies have explored homeland security culture and the politics of contemporary motherhood from critical perspectives, no study to date has considered how recent discourses of motherhood and nation are deeply enmeshed and, as this book argues, mutually constitutive. As reproductive bodies are represented as a threat to national security, either through supposed excess or deficiency, a culture of homeland maternity intensifies the requirements of motherhood as it works to discipline those who refuse to adhere. Homeland Maternity offers a way to understand how the policing of maternal bodies in contemporary US culture serves an overt but unexamined political function—namely, securing the nation in times of perceived vulnerability, and with profound implications for reproductive justice.
