Confronting Postmaternal Thinking

Confronting Postmaternal Thinking

Author: Julie Stephens

Publisher:

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 9786613629432

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Public discourse maintains a deep cultural anxiety around expressions of maternalism and the application of maternal values to the society as a whole. In a policy context, postmaternalism is the priority given to women's claims as employees over their political claims as mothers. Julie Stephens moves beyond these policy definitions and advances a notion of postmaternal thinking to signal this growing unease with maternal forms of subjectivity and maternalist perspectives. In defining the contours of postmaternal thought, she details the elaborate processes of cultural forgetting that go hand.


Confronting Postmaternal Thinking

Confronting Postmaternal Thinking

Author: Julie Stephens

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2012-03-20

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0231520565

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There is a deep cultural anxiety around public expressions of maternalism and the application of maternal values to society as a whole. Julie Stephens examines why postmaternal thinking has become so influential in recent decades and why there has been a growing unease with maternal forms of subjectivity and maternalist perspectives. In moving beyond policy definitions, which emphasize the priority given to women's claims as employees over their political claims as mothers, Stephens details an elaborate process of cultural forgetting that has accompanied this repudiation of the maternal. Reclaiming an alternative feminist position through an investigation of oral history, life narratives, Web blogs, and other rich and varied sources, Stephens confronts the core claims of postmaternal thought and challenges dominant representations of feminism as having forgotten motherhood. Deploying the interpretive framework of memory studies, she examines the political structures of forgetting surrounding the maternal and the weakening of nurture and care in the public domain. She views the promotion of an illusory, self-sufficient individualism as a form of social unmothering that is profoundly connected to this ethos. In rejecting both traditional maternalism and the new postmaternalism, Stephens challenges prevailing paradigms and makes way for an alternative feminist maternalism centering on a politics of care.


Confronting Postmaternal Thinking

Confronting Postmaternal Thinking

Author: Julie Stephens

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2012-03-20

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 0231149204

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Julie Stephens confronts the core claims of postmaternal thought and criticises dominant representations of feminism as having forgotten motherhood. She does this through an investigation of oral histories, life narratives, web blogs, and other rich and varied sources. The book highlights the deep cultural anxiety that exists around public expressions of maternalism. It examines why postmaternal thinking has become so influential in recent decades and asks why there has been a growing unease with maternal forms of subjectivity and maternalist perspectives.


In (M)other Words

In (M)other Words

Author: Andrea O'Reilly

Publisher: Demeter Press

Published: 2024-04-30

Total Pages: 540

ISBN-13: 1772585289

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Dr. Andrea O'Reilly is internationally recognized as the founder of Motherhood Studies (2006) and its subfield Maternal Theory (2007), and creator of the concept of Matricentric Feminism, a feminism for and about mothers (2016) and Matricritics, a literary theory and practice for a reading of mother-focused texts (2021). With this collection O'Reilly continues the conversation on the meaning and nature of motherhood initiated by Adrienne Rich in Of Woman Born close to fifty years ago. In In (M)other Words, O'Reilly shares 25 of her chapters and articles published between 2009-2024 to examine the oppressive and empowering dimensions of mothering and to explore motherhood as institution, experience, subjectivity, and empowerment. The collection considers the central themes and theories of motherhood studies including normative motherhood, feminist mothering, maternal regret, matricentric pedagogy, young mothers, academic motherhood, matricentric feminism, matricritics, motherhood and feminism, the motherhood memoir, the twenty-first-century motherhood movement, mothers and daughters, mothers and sons, pandemic mothering, and the motherline.


Australian Mothering

Australian Mothering

Author: Carla Pascoe Leahy

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-01-28

Total Pages: 501

ISBN-13: 3030202674

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This collection defines the field of maternal studies in Australia for the first time. Leading motherhood researchers explore how mothering has evolved across Australian history as well as the joys and challenges of being a mother today. The contributors cover pregnancy, birth, relationships, childcare, domestic violence, time use, work, welfare, policy and psychology, from a diverse range of maternal perspectives. Utilising a matricentric feminist framework, Australian Mothering foregrounds the experiences, emotions and perspectives of mothers to better understand how Australian motherhood has developed historically and contemporaneously. Drawing upon their combined sociological and historical expertise, Bueskens and Pascoe Leahy have carefully curated a collection that presents compelling research on past and present perspectives on maternity in Australia, which will be relevant to researchers, advocates and policy makers interested in the changing role of mothers in Australian society.


Maternal Theory

Maternal Theory

Author: Andrea O'Reilly

Publisher: Demeter Press

Published: 2021-07-08

Total Pages: 802

ISBN-13: 1772584037

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Theory on mothers, mothering and motherhood has emerged as a distinct body of knowledge within Motherhood Studies and Feminist Theory more generally. This collection, The Second Edition of Maternal Theory: Essential Readings introduces readers to this rich and diverse tradition of maternal theory. Composed of 60 chapters the 2nd edition includes two sections: the first with the classic texts by Adrienne Rich, Nancy Chodorow, Sara Ruddick, Alice Walker, Barbara Katz Rothman, bell hooks, Sharon Hays, Patricia Hill-Collins, Audre Lorde, Daphne de Marneffe, Judith Warner, Patrice diQinizio, Susan Maushart, and many more. The second section includes thirty new chapters on vital and new topics including Trans Parenting, Non-Binary Parenting, Queer Mothering, Matricentric Feminism, Normative Motherhood, Maternal Subjectivity, Maternal Narratology, Maternal Ambivalence, Maternal Regret, Monstrous Mothers, The Migrant Maternal, Reproductive Justice, Feminist Mothering, Feminist Fathering, Indigenous Mothering, The Digital Maternal, The Opt-Out Revolution, Black Motherhoods, Motherlines, The Motherhood Memoir, Pandemic Mothering, and many more. Maternal Theory is essential reading for anyone interested in motherhood as experience, ideology, and identity.


Refiguring the Postmaternal

Refiguring the Postmaternal

Author: Maria Fannin

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-10-16

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 1351200097

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This book explores the concept of the ‘postmaternal’ as a response to changing cultural, political and economic conditions for motherhood and responds to Julie Stephens’ contention that gender-neutral feminism has led to a forgetting of the maternal within feminist memory. In Confronting Postmaternal Thinking: Feminism, Memory, Care (2011) Stephens identifies a significant cultural anxiety about care-giving, nurturing and human dependency she calls ‘postmaternal’ thinking. Stephens argues that maternal forms of care have been rejected in the public sphere and marginalised to the private domain through an elaborate process of cultural forgetting, in turn contributing to the current dominance of a degendered form of feminism. This book argues that refiguring postmaternalism requires opening up the maternal beyond the category of mothers and the nuclear family. The chapters in this edited volume contribute to the field of maternal studies by investigating the connections between maternalism, feminism and neoliberalism through diverse feminist theories, cases and methodologies. We challenge Stephens’ diagnosis of the ‘forgetting’ of certain forms of maternal practices from feminism’s history by highlighting the ongoing contested place of the maternal in feminist scholarship and activism for the last five decades. We argue that the memorializing of the maternal in feminist scholarship needs to reflect its diverse legacies in the analyses of black feminism, socialist feminism and ecofeminism in order to destabilise the association of the maternal with neoliberalism and the depoliticization of feminism. This book was originally published as a special issue of Australian Feminist Studies.


Nancy Chodorow and The Reproduction of Mothering

Nancy Chodorow and The Reproduction of Mothering

Author: Petra Bueskens

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-11-30

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 3030555909

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This book analyzes Nancy Chodorow’s canonical book The Reproduction of Mothering, bringing together an original essay from Nancy Chodorow and a host of outstanding international scholars—including Rosemary Balsam, Adrienne Harris, Elizabeth Abel, Madelon Sprengnether, Ilene Philipson, Meg Jay, Daphne de Marneffe, Alison Stone and Petra Bueskens—in a mix of memoir, festschrift, reflection, critical analysis and new directions in Chodorowian scholarship. In the 40 years since its publication, The Reproduction of Mothering has had a profound impact on scholarship across many disciplines including sociology, psychoanalysis, psychology, ethics, literary criticism and women’s and gender studies. Organized as a “reproduction of mothering scholarship”, this volume adopts a generationally differentiated structure weaving personal, political and scholarly essays. This book will be of interest to scholars across the social sciences and humanities. It will bring Nancy Chodorow and her canonical work to a new generation showcasing classic and contemporary Chodorowian scholarship.


Essential Breakthroughs: Conversations about Men, Mothers and Mothering

Essential Breakthroughs: Conversations about Men, Mothers and Mothering

Author: Fionna Joy Green

Publisher: Demeter Press

Published: 2015-11-01

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1772580309

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Essential Breakthroughs: Conversations About Men, Mothers, and Mothering thinks from the nexus of gender, essentialism, and care. The authors creatively blend the philosophical and the personal to collectively argue that while gender is essential to our social and theoretical definitions of care, it is dangerously co-opted into naturalized discourses, which limit particular identities and negate certain forms of care. The perspectives curated in Essential Breakthroughs illuminate how care, as a respected and productive cultural ethic, is neither inherent nor instinctual for any human, but is learned and fostered. The chapters are informed by feminist, queer, and trans politics, wielding post-structuralist methodologies of unlearning and deconstruction, while maintaining the maternal lens as a credible feminist analytical tool and not as a gender-essentialist practice.


Francophone Oceania Today

Francophone Oceania Today

Author: Michelle Royer

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2024-11-19

Total Pages: 165

ISBN-13: 1835532292

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Francophone Oceania Today: Literature, Visual Arts, Music and Cinema is a compilation of essays that breaks new ground in the exploration of recent and contemporary cultural expressions emerging from Francophone Oceania. This books explores Francophone Oceania today: a region rich in literary, artistic, and cultural productions, which nonetheless remains a marginalised space within Francophone Studies and disconnected from the mostly Anglophone cultural networks currently deployed in the South Pacific. Francophone Oceania Today: Literature, Visual Arts, Music and Cinema establishes an état présent of recent and contemporary Francophone Oceanian literature, visual arts, music and cinema. It measures the local and global diffusion of Francophone Oceanian culture today and examines its key thematic and critical approaches, including ecocritical perspectives on art, literature, and cinema, while proposing new directions for research in the region. Francophone Oceania Today opens a much-needed critical conversation between scholarly disciplines, between French-speaking and English-speaking academics, and between university researchers, museum professionals, and artistic voices. Our book contains hitherto unpublished contributions by Mā'ohi Nui/French Polynesian writer Chantal T. Spitz and by New Caledonian writer Nicolas Kurtovitch (in English translations by Jean Anderson). Our book aims to draw interdisciplinary bridges among literature, cinema, music and the visual arts, and to account for the various cross-fertilisations currently happening in the region. Ultimately, what emerges from our volume is a multifaceted reflexion on the contemporary existence of Francophone Oceania, showcasing the diversity of views, artforms, critical perspectives and artistic voices that are gathered across its islands and the sea that surrounds them.