This Handbook showcases representations of parenthood in twenty-first-century popular culture, critically assessing how these representations shape, respond to, and redefine notions of families, as well as popular culture genres. Uniquely, the collection brings together motherhood, fatherhood, and parenthood studies. Chapters use intersectional approaches to illuminate LGBTQ+, racialized, Indigenous, and AI-generated as well as normative or ‘mainstream’ parental subjectivities and also address the topic of non-parenthood. The volume analyzes games, comics, social media, literature, film, television, and more. It is global in scope, signaled by the diverse cultural and geopolitical locations of the contributors and the texts they examine. Chapters are produced out of and/or are set within Canada, the United States, Britain, Ireland, Italy, Sweden, Finland, India, Iran, China, Japan, South Korea, Jamaica, South Africa, and Australia.

Elizabeth Podnieks is a Professor in the Department of English at Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada. She is the co-editor of Textual Mothers/Maternal Texts: Motherhood in Contemporary Women’s Literatures; and the sole editor of Mediating Moms: Mothers in Popular Culture, and Pops in Pop Culture: Fatherhood, Masculinity, and the New Man. Her most recent monograph is Maternal Modernism: Narrating New Mothers (Palgrave, 2023).

Helena Wahlström Henriksson is Professor at the Centre for Gender Research at Uppsala University, Sweden. Her work on representations of fathers and mothers in literature, media, and film has appeared in monographs including New Fathers? Contemporary American Stories of Masculinity, Domesticity, and Kinship (2010). She has edited several collections, including Narratives of Motherhood and Mothering in Fiction and Life Writing (Palgrave, 2023).