Memoirs and Dr. Mary Thompson
Office of the Provost
Dr. Mary Thompson is an Associate Professor of English and the coordinator of the Women’s and Gender Studies program, where she teaches courses in women’s literature and feminist theory. Her research investigates literary and popular culture representations of reproductive justice issues. Her work has appeared in GENDERS, Feminist Media Studies, Journal for the Motherhood Initiative and Frontiers. Dr. Thompson’s current research monograph, Thinking Back Through Our Mothers: Abortion in 21st Century U.S. Women’s Life-Writing, is a feminist examination of the unexpected and critically neglected role of abortion in women’s life-writing narratives.
Thompson’s work investigates narratives about reproductive health by looking at mother-daughter memoirs and mommy memoirs, writing that often overlaps in how it treats reproductive choices. For example, Thompson studies Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence (2007) by Rebecca Walker, the third wave feminist icon and daughter of Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple. Typical of the genre, Baby Love is written in journal form, addressed to her future child, and recounts conception, pregnancy, childbirth and forays into parenting. Interspersed are meditations on Walker’s relationship with her mother (the two are notoriously estranged). Walker describes having an abortion as a teenager and her concern that, as a result, she is disqualified from motherhood and her fear that she had been sterilized.
Thompson highlights abortion as an unexpected element in mommy memoirs, but notes how Baby Love is a disappointing text from a feminist perspective. As recent studies have shown (Dymond and Willey; O’Reilly and Bizzini; Brown), the mommy-memoir makes a disquieting return to bio-essentialized ideas of motherhood. Baby Love is no exception. On the other hand, comparing how Rebecca Walker writes about abortion to how her mother did in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983), Dr. Thompson arrives at a different assessment of the genre’s feminist contributions. Alice Walker wrote simply that abortion “gave me my life back”—undoubtedly a true if unelaborated claim. Rebecca Walker’s reflection on abortion, however, reveals how some pro-choice women (Walker is prochoice) now write openly about feelings of loss following abortion. Thompson’s research contends that by rhetorically aligning themselves with the institution of motherhood, authors of mommy-memoirs are authorized to speak about abortion—often in ways that subvert assumptions about abortion and motherhood. Thompson is anticipating completion of her manuscript in summer 2016.
Dr. Thompson’s teaching and research interests include American studies, women’s and gender studies, and literature/composition. When it comes to women’s and gender studies in particular, she is interested in feminist theory and activism; reproductive justice; the body; intersections of gender, sexuality, ethnicity and class; gender/masculinity studies; and third wave feminism.
Dr. Thompson received her M.A. in English from the University of Vermont and her Ph.D. in American Culture Studies from Bowling Green State University. She taught courses at the University of Vermont, Bowling Green State University and Michigan State University before coming to JMU. Dr. Thompson is active on and off campus as she has presented at twenty conferences in the past nine years and has organized several guest lectures at JMU (Katrina Powell, Modhumita Roy, Loretta Ross, and Amy Andre to name a few).
