Matricentric feminist reading of Elisa Albert's After Birth (2015) and Sheila Heti's Motherhood (2018)

This thesis examines Elisa Albert's After Birth (2015) and Sheila Heti's Motherhood (2018) from the perspective of matricentric feminism. First coined by Andrea O'Reilly in 2016, matricentric feminism enables a reading that centralizes maternal experience, mothers' needs, and motherhood itself in an epistemological stand. Employed in this thesis, this theory sheds light on the ways how After Birth and Motherhood rethink and reconstruct the concept of motherhood. The research, which is positioned within the cultural and political atmosphere of fourth-wave feminism, suggests that motherhood is a multilayered concept. It is shaped by social, cultural, political and psychological elements. In the dialogue with this perspective, both After Birth and Motherhood depict motherhood not as a stable or universally shared condition but as an experience marked by ambivalence, fragmentation, and negotiation. These works show that motherhood includes many complexities, challenges, and alternatives, including forms of mothering that extend beyond biological maternity. The thesis follows a thematic and structural approach in the analysis of After Birth and Motherhood and seeks to find an answer to how these texts fictionalize the emotional and bodily complexities of motherhood alongside its non-traditional possibilities.