Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal Subjectivity

Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal Subjectivity PDF 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.

Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal Subjectivity

Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal Subjectivity PDF Author: Alison Stone
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136593519
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Get Book

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.

The Obligated Self

The Obligated Self PDF Author: Mara H. Benjamin
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253034361
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
Mara H. Benjamin contends that the physical and psychological work of caring for children presents theologically fruitful but largely unexplored terrain for feminists. Attending to the constant, concrete, and urgent needs of children, she argues, necessitates engaging with profound questions concerning the responsible use of power in unequal relationships, the transformative influence of love, human fragility and vulnerability, and the embeddedness of self in relationships and obligations. Viewing child-rearing as an embodied practice, Benjamin's theological reflection invites a profound reengagement with Jewish sources from the Talmud to modern Jewish philosophy. Her contemporary feminist stance forges a convergence between Jewish theological anthropology and the demands of parental caregiving.

Unsafe Motherhood

Unsafe Motherhood PDF Author: Nicole S. Berry
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781845459963
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Since 1987, when the global community first recognized the high frequency of women in developing countries dying from pregnancy-related causes, little progress has been made to combat this problem. This study follows the global policies that have been implemented in Sololá, Guatemala in order to decrease high rates of maternal mortality among indigenous Mayan women. The author examines the diverse meanings and understandings of motherhood, pregnancy, birth and birth-related death among the biomedical personnel, village women, their families, and midwives. These incongruous perspectives, in conjunction with the implementation of such policies, threaten to disenfranchise clients from their own cultural understandings of self. The author investigates how these policies need to meld with the everyday lives of these women, and how the failure to do so will lead to a failure to decrease maternal deaths globally.

Maternal Subjectivity

Maternal Subjectivity PDF Author: Ellen L.K. Toronto
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000916936
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 157

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Book Description
In this book, Ellen Toronto reveals the dissociation of maternal subjectivity from human experience and provides a psychoanalytic exploration of the (non-)history of motherhood to make possible an understanding and appreciation of maternal worlds. The persistent patriarchal order acknowledges the mother’s existence largely as a ‘womb’, a bearer of children, and although her role is essential in the service of the species, we know very little of her story as a person. The absent presence of the mother as an individual subject and collective ignorance about her experiences has constituted an existential trauma, that is, a trauma of non-existence, and it is only by revealing this dissociation, Toronto argues, that we can begin to excavate the stories of individual mothers as they have borne and raised the world’s children, and at last realise that the burdens they carry belong to us all. As a fulsome account of the maternal perspective, which draws from a variety of sources - including historical research, mythological stories and clinical case material – this book will be significant for students of psychoanalysis, feminism and history, as well as psychoanalysts in training and in practice who seek a richer understanding of maternal being.

The Mother in Psychoanalysis and Beyond

The Mother in Psychoanalysis and Beyond PDF 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

The Maternal, Digital Subjectivity, and the Aesthetics of Interruption

The Maternal, Digital Subjectivity, and the Aesthetics of Interruption PDF Author: EL Putnam
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501364804
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Bringing together philosophies of the maternal with digital technology may appear to be an arbitrary pairing. However, reading them intertextually through select creative practices reveals how both encompass an aesthetics of interruption that becomes a novel means of understanding subjectivity. EL Putnam investigates how the digital performances of certain artists, creators, and technologists rupture existing representations of the maternal, taking advantage of the formal properties of digital media. What results are interruptions of visual and aural constructions through an immanent merging of the performing body with digital technologies. Putnam bases her analysis on close examinations of the way certain makers use the formal properties of digital imagery, such as the gap, the glitch, and the lag, as means of rendering images of the maternal uncanny in order to challenge mediation, constituting an aesthetics of interruption. The result is a radical critical strategy for engaging with digital technology and subsequent understandings of the subject that defy current modes of assimilation.

Subjectivity Without Subjects

Subjectivity Without Subjects PDF Author: Kelly Oliver
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 1461642671
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
What do the Promise Keeper's Movement and the Million Man March reveal about our notions of masculinity and paternal responsibility? What can such films as Varda's Vagabond and Bergman's Persona tell us about contemporary notions of masculinity and femininity? In this provocative new book, well-known feminist and philosopher Kelly Oliver examines the dynamics of identity to develop a new theory which challenges traditional notions of paternity and maternity.

The Mother in Psychoanalysis and Beyond

The Mother in Psychoanalysis and Beyond PDF Author: Rosalind Mayo
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317503600
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
The question of what it means to be a mother is a very contentious topic in psychoanalysis and in wider society. The Mother in Psychoanalysis and Beyond explores our relationship to the maternal through psychoanalysis, philosophy, art and political and gender studies. Over two years, a group of psychotherapists and members of the public met at the Philadelphia Association for a series of seminars on the Maternal. In the discussions that followed, a chasm opened up slowly and painfully between the idealised longings and fantasies we all share and the realities of maternal experiences: here were met the great silences of love, loss, longing, memories, desire, hatred and ambivalence. This book is the result of this bringing together in conversation and reflections of what so often seems unsayable about the Mother. It examines how issues of personal and gender identity are shaped by the ideals of separation from the mother, the fears and anxiety of merging with the mother, and how this has often led, in psychoanalysis and society, to holding mothers responsible for a variety of personal and social ills and problems in which maternal vulnerability is denied and silenced. There are two main themes running throughout the book: Matricide and Maternal Subjectivity. On the theme of matricide, several contributors discuss the ways in which the discourse and narratives of the Mother have been silenced on a sociocultural level and within psychoanalysis and philosophy in favour of discourses that promote independence, autonomy, power and the avoidance and denial of our fundamental helplessness and vulnerability. On the theme of maternal subjectivity, several chapters look at the actual experience of mothering and/or our relationship to our mother, to highlight the ways in which the maternal is intimately connected with human subjectivity. The Mother in Psychoanalysis and Beyond provides new and provocative thinking about the maternal and its place in various contemporary discourses. It will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and psychologists of different schools, scholars and advanced students of art, gender studies, politics and philosophy as well as anyone interested in maternity studies and the relationship between the maternal and human subjectivity.

Women, Mothers, Subjects

Women, Mothers, Subjects PDF 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.

Representations of Motherhood

Representations of Motherhood PDF Author: Donna Bassin
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300068634
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Explores the maternal experience from the mother's point of view. The book questions a society that has devalued and sentimentalized motherhood, and presents images of generative and creative women who are also mothers. It also discusses the portrayal of mothers in art, film and literature.