Remembering Maternal Bodies

Remembering Maternal Bodies PDF

Author: B. Trigo

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2006-01-21

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 1403983380

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Remembering Maternal Bodies is a collection of essays about the writings of several Latina and Latin American women writers who remember their mothers, and/or challenge our commonly held beliefs about motherhood and maternity, in an effort to stop depression and melancholy. It suggests that the widespread violent depression and sometimes suicidal melancholy that haunts our culture and society is the result of a terrible fantasy about the way we become ourselves. This fantasy has a matricide at its core, and this matricide will continue to have its depressing effect on us as long as it remains in place and invisible. The authors showcased in this book make visible this fantasy and change it in their works in an effort to bring us out of our depression and melancholy.

Maternal Bodies

Maternal Bodies PDF

Author: Nora Doyle

Publisher:

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 9781469637181

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In the second half of the eighteenth century, motherhood came to be viewed as women's most important social role, and the figure of the good mother was celebrated as a moral force in American society. Nora Doyle shows that depictions of motherhood in American culture began to define the ideal mother by her emotional and spiritual roles rather than by her physical work as a mother. As a result of this new vision, lower-class women and non-white women came to be excluded from the identity of the good mother because American culture defined them in terms of their physical labor. However, Doyle also shows that childbearing women contradicted the ideal of the disembodied mother in their personal accounts and instead perceived motherhood as fundamentally defined by the work of their bodies. Enslaved women were keenly aware that their reproductive bodies carried a literal price, while middle-class and elite white women dwelled on the physical sensations of childbearing and childrearing. Thus motherhood in this period was marked by tension between the lived experience of the maternal body and the increasingly ethereal vision of the ideal mother that permeated American print culture.

Maternal Bodies

Maternal Bodies PDF

Author: Nora Doyle

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2018-03-19

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 1469637200

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In the second half of the eighteenth century, motherhood came to be viewed as women's most important social role, and the figure of the good mother was celebrated as a moral force in American society. Nora Doyle shows that depictions of motherhood in American culture began to define the ideal mother by her emotional and spiritual roles rather than by her physical work as a mother. As a result of this new vision, lower-class women and non-white women came to be excluded from the identity of the good mother because American culture defined them in terms of their physical labor. However, Doyle also shows that childbearing women contradicted the ideal of the disembodied mother in their personal accounts and instead perceived motherhood as fundamentally defined by the work of their bodies. Enslaved women were keenly aware that their reproductive bodies carried a literal price, while middle-class and elite white women dwelled on the physical sensations of childbearing and childrearing. Thus motherhood in this period was marked by tension between the lived experience of the maternal body and the increasingly ethereal vision of the ideal mother that permeated American print culture.

Inappropriate Bodies Art, Design and Maternity

Inappropriate Bodies Art, Design and Maternity PDF

Author: Buller Rachel Epp

Publisher: Demeter Press

Published: 2019-09-01

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1772582557

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This edited collection examines conflicting assumptions, expectations, and perceptions of maternity in artistic, cultural, and institutional contexts. Over the past two decades, the maternal body has gained currency in popular culture and the contemporary art world, with many books and exhibitions foregrounding artists’ experiences and art historical explorations of maternity that previously were marginalized or dismissed. In too many instances, however, the maternal potential of female bodies—whether realized or not—still causes them to be stigmatized, censored, or otherwise treated as inappropriate: cultural expectations of maternity create one set of prejudices against women whose bodies or experiences do align with those same expectations, and another set of prejudices against those whose do not. Support for mothers in the paid workforce remains woefully inadequate, yet in many cultural contexts, social norms continue to ask what is “wrong” with women who do not have children. In these essays and conversations, artists and writers discuss how maternal expectations shape both creative work and designed environments, and highlight alternative ways of existing in relation to those expectations.

Bearing the Weight of the World

Bearing the Weight of the World PDF

Author: Alys Einion

Publisher:

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781772581713

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The maternal body is a site of contested dynamics of power, identity, experience, autonomy, occupation, and control. Representations of the maternal body can mis/represent the childbearing and mothering form variously, often as monstrous, idealized, limited, scrutinized, or occupied, whilst dominant discourses limit motherhood through social devaluation. The maternal body has long been a hypervisible artifact: at once bracketed out in the interest of elevating the contributions of sperm-carriers or fetal status; and regarded with hostility and suspicion as out of control. Such arguments are deployed to justify surveillance mechanisms, medical scrutiny, and expectation of self-discipline.This volume helps to develop a more critical understanding of what it means to be an embodied mother. The materiality of maternity and its centrality to family and social life remains too often viewed as a ?fringe? subject, the province of feminists, activists, hysterical women. For too long, the maternal body has been subject to ?expert? advice, guidance, censure, and control. Those of us maternal bodies are at risk of being commodified and diminished, having our bodily realities reduced to mechanistic functions and our lived experience disregarded. From art to medical surveillance, from genetics to radioactivity, goddess to breastfeeding, poetry to Indigenous community, dance to body size, the critical eye of the academic and the lived experience of the mother bring into being in this work a body of understanding, of expression, of knowledge and the power and authority of the lived experience, through and about the embodied mother. This critical-creative work encompasses new insights, new research, and redeveloped perspectives which combine the personal with the pervasive and point to new meaning-making in critical motherhood studies via the medium of the maternal body.

Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution PDF

Author: Adrienne Rich

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2021-04-27

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 039386734X

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The pathbreaking investigation into motherhood and womanhood from an influential and enduring feminist voice, now for a new generation. In Of Woman Born, originally published in 1976, influential poet and feminist Adrienne Rich examines the patriarchic systems and political institutions that define motherhood. Exploring her own experience—as a woman, a poet, a feminist, and a mother—she finds the act of mothering to be both determined by and distinct from the institution of motherhood as it is imposed on all women everywhere. A “powerful blend of research, theory, and self-reflection” (Sandra M. Gilbert, Paris Review), Of Woman Born revolutionized how women thought about motherhood and their own liberation. With a stirring new foreword from National Book Critics Circle Award–winning writer Eula Biss, the book resounds with as much wisdom and insight today as when it was first written.

Founding Mothers

Founding Mothers PDF

Author: Cokie Roberts

Publisher:

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 690

ISBN-13: 9780739443682

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Cokie Roberts sheds new light on the generation of heroines, reformers, and visionaries who helped shape our nation with this blend of biographical portraits and behind-the-scenes vignettes chronicling women's public roles and private responsibilities. Drawing on personal correspondence, private journals, and other primary sources--many of them previously unpublished--Roberts brings to life the extraordinary accomplishments of women who laid the groundwork for a better society. Almost every quotation here is written by a woman, to a woman, or about a woman. From first ladies to freethinkers, educators to explorers, this exceptional group includes Abigail Adams, Margaret Bayard Smith, Martha Jefferson, Dolley Madison, Elizabeth Monroe, Louisa Catherine Adams, Eliza Hamilton, Theodosia Burr, Rebecca Gratz, Louisa Livingston, Rosalie Calvert, Sacajawea, and others.--From publisher description.

Philosophy and the Maternal Body

Philosophy and the Maternal Body PDF

Author: Michelle Boulous Walker

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 235

ISBN-13: 9780415168571

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Philosophy and the Maternal Body gives a new voice to the mother and the maternal body which have often been viewed as silent within philosophy. Michelle Boulous Walker clearly shows how some male theorists have appropriated maternity, and suggests new ways of articulating the maternal body and women's experience of pregnancy and motherhood.

Screening Motherhood in Contemporary World Cinema

Screening Motherhood in Contemporary World Cinema PDF

Author: Asma Sayed

Publisher: Demeter Press

Published: 2016-02-01

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 1772580465

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Using a variety of critical and theoretical approaches, the contributing scholars to this collection analyze culturally specific and globally held attitudes about mothers and mothering, as represented in world cinema. Examining films from a range of countries including Afghanistan, India, Iran, Eastern Europe, Canada, and the United States, the various chapters contextualize the socio-cultural realities of motherhood as they are represented on screen, and explore the maternal figure as she has been glamorized and celebrated, while simultaneously subjected to public scrutiny. Collectively, this scholarly investigation provides insights into where women’s struggles converge, while also highlighting the dramatically different realities of women around the globe.

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