Even though gender roles and family structures have radically changed in recent years, images of mothers and families in everyday culture are still often strongly shaped by the model of the bourgeois nuclear family and Christian traditions. Miriam Dreysse unpacks these traditions of representation and investigates contemporary theater and performance - as well as examples from dance, photography and video art - in her discussion of motherhood and family. Sophisticated performance analyses (Pollesch, She She Pop, Rimini Protokoll et al.) enable a gender-critical reading of contemporary theater and with this, give German theater studies a decisive push.