StFX English professor Dr. Kailin Wright has published a groundbreaking new book on reproductive justice and theatre in Canada. Her monograph, entitled No Mother, No Future: Performing Motherhood and Pregnancy Loss (Routledge Press 2026), explores representations of motherhood in Canadian theatre, literature, television, and media from the early 1900s to the present day.
Dr. Wright says the book, the first on the subject, takes an innovative approach to fostering dialogue about this timely and important subject by including five chapters as well as five interviews with artists, including Bruce Miller (showrunner of The Handmaid’s Tale television series), Djanet Sears (playwright of Harlem Duet), Yvette Nolan (director of Tombs of the Vanishing Indian), and Maev Beaty (actor and co-creator of Secret Life of a Mother). The book focuses on works by authors who identify as Africadian (African-Acadian), African-Canadian, Canadian, Cree, and Métis.
“Activists remind us that ‘storytelling is an act of subversion and resistance’ and we see this in Canadian theatre,” says Dr. Wright. “Reconsidering Canadian theatre and literature from a reproductive justice lens reveals the prominence of reproductive loss in the stories we tell and the stories we are told about nationhood and our future.”
Dr. Wright says she hopes this book helps to inspire more work on reproductive justice, a political movement and activist framework that intertwines social justice and reproductive rights to fight for the rights to have, not have, and parent a child in a safe and healthy environment.
Dr. Wright notes that “many StFX students worked as research assistants on this book, helping to transcribe interviews and track down key references.” These StFX students are credited in the book’s acknowledgments. Research for the book took her to archives and theatres across Canada and was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) through two grants: an Insight Development Grant and an Insight Grant.
The book’s table of contents can be found here: https://www.routledge.com/No-Mother-No-Future-Performing-Motherhood-and-Reproductive-Loss/Wright/p/book/9781032146577
As the publisher’s website describes, “No Mother, No Future investigates how theatre and performance use pregnancy loss to represent a lost future. Spanning the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this book analyzes performances that challenge dominant cultural scripts linking motherhood with futurity and nationhood in Canada and the United States. Combining intersectional feminism with theories of reproductive justice and reproductive futurity, this work interrogates how pregnancy loss—especially when experienced by those excluded from white, heteronormative ideals of motherhood—is often portrayed as a societal failure. It examines reproductive loss not only as a dramatic device but also as a political reality shaped by systemic violence, including slavery, forced sterilization, and child welfare policies that disproportionately target Indigenous and Black communities. Through in-depth analyses and original interviews with playwrights, directors, and actors, this volume offers a critical framework for understanding how performance stages reproductive loss as a site of resistance.”
StFX English professor Dr. Laura Estill says that “it is important to understand that the monograph marks the highest level of achievement in our field.” As the first book-length study of motherhood and reproduction in Canadian theatre, No Mother, No Future is an exciting new intervention in the fields of theatre and performance studies.
