Remembering Maternal Bodies

Remembering Maternal Bodies
Author: B. Trigo
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2006-01-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1403983380

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
Author: Nora Doyle
Publisher:
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2018
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 9781469637181

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
Author: Nora Doyle
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2018-03-19
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1469637200

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.

Bearing the weight of the world Exploring Maternal Embodiment

Bearing the weight of the world Exploring Maternal Embodiment
Author: Alys Einion
Publisher: Demeter Press
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2018-10-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1772582018

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.

Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution
Author: Adrienne Rich
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2021-04-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 039386734X

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.

Nightbitch

Nightbitch
Author: Rachel Yoder
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2021-07-20
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0385546823

SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING AMY ADAMS • In this blazingly smart and voracious debut novel, an artist turned stay-at-home mom becomes convinced she's turning into a dog. • "A must-read for anyone who can’t get enough of the ever-blurring line between the psychological and supernatural that Yellowjackets exemplifies." —Vulture One day, the mother was a mother, but then one night, she was quite suddenly something else... An ambitious mother puts her art career on hold to stay at home with her newborn son, but the experience does not match her imagination. Two years later, she steps into the bathroom for a break from her toddler's demands, only to discover a dense patch of hair on the back of her neck. In the mirror, her canines suddenly look sharper than she remembers. Her husband, who travels for work five days a week, casually dismisses her fears from faraway hotel rooms. As the mother's symptoms intensify, and her temptation to give in to her new dog impulses peak, she struggles to keep her alter-canine-identity secret. Seeking a cure at the library, she discovers the mysterious academic tome which becomes her bible, A Field Guide to Magical Women: A Mythical Ethnography, and meets a group of mommies involved in a multilevel-marketing scheme who may also be more than what they seem. An outrageously original novel of ideas about art, power, and womanhood wrapped in a satirical fairy tale, Nightbitch will make you want to howl in laughter and recognition. And you should. You should howl as much as you want.

Philosophy and the Maternal Body

Philosophy and the Maternal Body
Author: Michelle Boulous Walker
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 235
Release: 1998
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 9780415168571

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.

Maternities Gender Bodies and Spaces

Maternities Gender Bodies and Spaces
Author: Longhurst
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2006-10-01
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 9780203008201

Over the past decade geographers have shown a growing interest in 'the body' including the gendered body, as an important co-ordinate of subjectivity; and as a way of understanding further relationships between people, place and space. To date, however geographers have published very little on what must surely be one of, if not the, &most important of all bodies - bodies that conceive, give birth&and nurture other bodies. This book explores the diversity&and complexity of embodied experiences of&maternity, illustrating how maternal bodies are constructed through different social, cultural&and economic networks, and through different places and spaces.

Screening Motherhood in Contemporary World Cinema

Screening Motherhood in Contemporary World Cinema
Author: Asma Sayed
Publisher: Demeter Press
Total Pages: 420
Release: 2016-02-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1772580465

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.