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"Are you Mom enough?" It was a question posed recently by a Time magazine article. Featuring a cover image of a mother breastfeeding her three-year-old son, the story explored attachment parenting, a form of childrearing that places intense physical and emotional demands on mothers. But deciding how to raise your child is only one of many concerns facing modern moms, says a Ryerson researcher.

Elizabeth Podnieks, a professor of English whose research interests include mothering, has authored or edited several books - two of which were published in April. The first, a unique collection of essays entitled Mediating Moms: Mothers in Popular Culture (McGill-Queen's University Press), argues that mothers have received unprecedented coverage in pop culture since the late 20th century.

"The book looks at the ideology promoted by the media that motherhood is all-encompassing. That the only right choice is to be a mother and then to devote yourself completely to it," says Podnieks, who has two children.

Mediating Moms analyzes representations of mothers in such media as film, TV, tabloids, pregnancy manuals and parenting magazines in order to examine numerous contemporary topics. They include maternal identities (e.g., working, stay-at-home, ambivalent, absent, single, teen, elder and lesbian mothers) and mother-related issues (e.g., self-care, pregnancy, abortion, contraception, adoption, sex and sexuality, breastfeeding, post-partum depression and reproductive technologies). Going even further, Mediating Moms also highlights alternative ways to interpret, and thereby resist, mainstream media representations of mothers.

In addition to editing Mediating Moms, Podnieks wrote one chapter for the book. Her chapter, called "'The Bump is Back': Celebrity Moms, Entertainment Journalism, and the 'Media Mother Police,'" examines how tabloids determine if famous mothers are either "good" or "bad" mothers - and thus, worthy of envy or hatred.

For example, Podnieks notes that Angelina Jolie and Britney Spears have been treated quite differently by the tabloids. While one has been glorified as "Mom-gelina," the other has been vilified as "Unfit-ney" - largely due to the latter's unconventional parenting style and mental health problems. Essentially, Podnieks argues, mothers' reputations rise and fall in relation to women's adherence to the rules of "New Momism," which paints a romanticized picture of the flawless mother.

The maternal experience also informs Podnieks's other recent book. Rough Draft: The Modernist Diaries of Emily Holmes Coleman, 1929-1937 (Rowman and Littlefield) is an edited selection of the diaries kept by the American poet and novelist during her years living in France and England. It was during this time that Coleman published the novel The Shutter of Snow (1930), which was one of the first literary works to depict post-partum depression.

In her third publication this spring, Podnieks explores her research in motherhood studies, how her background as a literary scholar contributes to her investigation of motherhood and how she negotiates her own motherhood practices in her scholarly work. That chapter, "Basketball, Skating, and Scholarship: Or, How to do Research from the Bench, the Rink, and the Car," is part of Academic Motherhood in a Post-Second Wave Context: Challenges, Strategies and Possibilities (Demeter Press), which was edited by Lynn O'Brien Hallstein of Boston University and Andrea O'Reilly of York University.

"I hope all these projects empower women to challenge conventional representations of motherhood," says Podnieks. "Everyday women can defy stereotypes and critique how the media creates maternal content."