Author: Alison Stone
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136593519
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216
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Book Description
In this book, Alison Stone develops a feminist approach to maternal subjectivity. Stone argues that in the West the self has often been understood in opposition to the maternal body, so that one must separate oneself from the mother and maternal care-givers on whom one depended in childhood to become a self or, in modernity, an autonomous subject. These assumptions make it difficult to be a mother and a subject, an autonomous creator of meaning. Insofar as mothers nonetheless strive to regain their subjectivity when their motherhood seems to have compromised it, theirs cannot be the usual kind of subjectivity premised on separation from the maternal body. Mothers are subjects of a new kind, who generate meanings and acquire agency from their position of re-immersion in the realm of maternal body relations, of bodily intimacy and dependency. Thus Stone interprets maternal subjectivity as a specific form of subjectivity that is continuous with the maternal body. Stone analyzes this form of subjectivity in terms of how the mother typically reproduces with her child her history of bodily relations with her own mother, leading to a distinctive maternal and cyclical form of lived time.
Author: Rosalind Mayo
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781138885042
Category : Mothers
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
8 Motherhood and art practice: Expressing maternal experience in visual art -- 9 The paradox of the maternal -- 10 Not-so-great expectations: Motherhood and the clash of private and public worlds -- 11 Learning to be a mother -- 12 Music and the maternal -- 13 The maternal and the erotic: An exploration of the links between maternal and erotic subjectivity -- 14 How shall we tell each other of our mothers? -- Index
Author: Patrice DiQuinzio
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415910231
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 300
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Book Description
An adequate analysis of experiences and situations specific to women, especially mothering, requires consideration of women's difference. A focus on women's difference, however, jeopardizes feminism's claims of women's equal individualist subjectivity, and risks recuperating the inequality and oppression of women, especially the view that all women should be mothers, want to be mothers, and are most happy being mothers. This book considers how thinkers including de Beauvoir, Kristeva, Chodorow and Rich struggle to negotiate this dilemma of difference in analyzing mothering, encompassing the paradoxes concerning embodiment, gender and representation they encounter. Patrice DiQuinzio shows that mothering has been and will continue to be an intractable problem for feminist theory, and argues for a reconceptualization of feminist theory itself, and suggests the political usefulness of an explicitly paradoxical politics of mothering.
Author: Kaja Silverman
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253116642
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 274
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Book Description
"... a vitally new understanding that takes us from the terms of the representation of sexual difference to an anatomy of female subjectivity which will be widely influential." -- Stephen Heath "An original work likely to have significant impact on all those with an interest in the vibrant intersection of feminism, film theory, and psychoanalysis... " -- Naomi Schor "... powerfully argued study... impressive... " -- Choice "... important because of its innovative work on Hollywood's ideologically-charged construction of subjectivity.... what is exciting about The Acoustic Mirror is that it inspires one to reevaluate a number of now classical theoretical texts, and to see films with an eye to how authorship is constructed and subjectivity is generated." -- Literature and Psychology "As evocative as it is shrewdly systematic, the pioneering theory of female subjectivity formulated in the final three chapters will have wide impact as a major contribution to feminist theory." -- SubStance The Acoustic Mirror attempts to do for the sound-track what feminist film theory of the past decade has done for the image-track -- to locate the points at which it is productive of sexual difference. The specific focus is the female voice understood not merely as spoken dialogue, narration, and commentary, but as a fantasmatic projection, and as a metaphor for authorship.
Author: Jane Lazarre
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822320395
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 180
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Book Description
A feminist classic and a valuable testimonial to the experience of mothering. Originally published in 1976 but still relevant today, this is a fierce, often funny, often painful description of Lazarre's first few years of motherhood.
Author: Maura Sheehy
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317676939
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 279
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Book Description
This collection, drawn from twelve years of the influential journal Studies in Gender and Sexuality, offers a groundbreaking advance in thinking and theorizing about what happens to women when they become mothers. It explores how women are changed and shaped by interaction with their children and the cultural constructs about motherhood in which they are embedded. Distinguished psychoanalysts, philosophers, feminists, gender and cultural theorists explore the meeting place of cultural representations of motherhood, maternal theory, and mothers interacting in the clinical setting and with their children, to illuminate how the process of becoming a mother creates and informs female subjectivity, identity, desire, expression, aggression, ambition, shame, envy, and relationships. Contributors find mothers to be complex subjects negotiating rich hybrid identities that explode received notions of maternal and even female subjectivity in their complexity. They create an exciting and very accessible new set of ideas and templates for thinking about mothers and women that will be of value to clinicians, academics, and mothers alike. This book was originally published as a special issue of Studies in Gender and Sexuality.
Author: Petra Bueskens
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317195450
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 451
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Book Description
Why do women in contemporary western societies experience contradiction between their autonomous and maternal selves? What are the origins of this contradiction and the associated ‘double shift’ that result in widespread calls to either ‘lean in’ or ‘opt out’? How are some mothers subverting these contradictions and finding meaningful ways of reconciling their autonomous and maternal selves? In Modern Motherhood and Women’s Dual Identities, Petra Bueskens argues that western modernisation consigned women to the home and released them from it in historically unprecedented, yet interconnected, ways. Her ground-breaking formulation is that western women are free as ‘individuals’ and constrained as mothers, with the twist that it is the former that produces the latter. Bueskens’ theoretical contribution consists of the identification and analysis of modern women’s duality, drawing on political philosophy, feminist theory and sociology tracking the changing nature of discourses of women, freedom and motherhood across three centuries. While the current literature points to the pervasiveness of contradiction and double-shifts for mothers, very little attention has been paid to how (some) women are subverting contradiction and ‘rewriting the sexual contract’. Bridging this gap, Bueskens’ interviews ten ‘revolving mothers’ to reveal how periodic absence, exceeding the standard work-day, disrupts the default position assigned to mothers in the home, and in turn disrupts the gendered dynamics of household work. A provocative and original work, Modern Motherhood and Women’s Dual Identities will appeal to graduate students and researchers interested in fields such as Women and Gender Studies, Sociology of Motherhood and Social and Political Theory.
Author: Marianne Hirsch
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
Includes information on anger, Margaret Atwood, Emma (Jane Austen), authority, The Awakening (Kate Chopin), Beloved (Toni Morrison), Nancy Chodorow, Clytemnestra and Electra, death, Demeter and Persephone, Daniel Deronda (George Eliot), Marguerite Duras, Everyday Use (Alice Walker), family romance, father, femininity, gender difference, heterosexuality, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, male, males, masculine, men, marriage plot, maternal, Oedipal theory, Oneʼs Own (Walker), patriarchy, plot, plot (female), pre-oedipal, procreation, Adrienne Rich, romance (love) plot, A Room of Oneʼs Own (Woolf), Sara Ruddick, separation from mother, Sula (Morrison), Susan Rubin Suleiman, Surfacing (Atwood), To the Lighthouse (Woolf), triangular relationships, voice, Edith Wharton, Christa Wolf, Virginia Woolf, etc.
Author: Amber Jacobs
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231512058
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 235
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Book Description
Despite advances in feminism, the "law of the father" remains the dominant model of Western psychological and cultural analysis, and the law of the mother continues to exist as an underdeveloped and marginal concept. In her radical rereading of the Greek myth, Oresteia, Amber Jacobs hopes to rectify the occlusion of the mother and reinforce her role as an active agent in the laws that determine and reinforce our cultural organization. According to Greek myth, Metis, Athena's mother, was Zeus's first wife. Zeus swallowed Metis to prevent her from bearing children who would overthrow him. Nevertheless, Metis bore Zeus a child-Athena-who sprang forth fully formed from his head. In Aeschylus's Oresteia, Athena's motherless status functions as a crucial justification for absolving Orestes of the crime of matricide. In his defense of Orestes, Zeus argues that the father is more important than the mother, using Athena's "motherless" birth as an example. Conducting a close reading of critical works on Aeschylus's text, Jacobs reveals that psychoanalytic theorists have unwittingly reproduced the denial of Metis in their own critiques. This repression, which can be found in the work of Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein as well as in the work of more contemporary theorists such as André Green and Luce Irigaray, has resulted in both an incomplete analysis of Oresteia and an inability to account for the fantasies and unconscious processes that fall outside the oedipal/patricidal paradigm. By bringing the story of Athena's mother, Metis, to the forefront, Jacobs challenges the primacy of the Oedipus myth in Western culture and psychoanalysis and introduces a bold new theory of matricide and maternal law. She finds that the Metis myth exists in cryptic forms within Aeschylus's text, uncovering what she terms the "latent content of the Oresteian myth," and argues that the occlusion of the law of the mother is proof of the patriarchal structures underlying our contemporary social and psychic realities. Jacobs's work not only provides new insight into the Oresteian trilogy but also advances a postpatriarchal model of the symbolic order that has strong ramifications for psychoanalysis, feminism, and theories of representation, as well as for clinical practice and epistemology.
Author: Petra Bueskens
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030555909
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 363
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Book Description
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.
