Author: Sarah Kowalski
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1631522736
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 312
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Book Description
At the age of thirty-nine, Sarah Kowalski heard her biological clock ticking, loudly. A single woman harboring a deep ambivalence about motherhood, Kowalski needed to decide once and for all: Did she want a baby or not? More importantly, with no partner on the horizon, did she want to have a baby alone? Once she revised her idea of motherhood—from an experience she would share with a partner to a journey she would embark upon alone—the answer came up a resounding Yes. After exploring her options, Kowalski chose to conceive using a sperm donor, but her plan stopped short when a doctor declared her infertile. How far would she go to make motherhood a reality? Kowalski catapulted herself into a diligent regimen of herbs, Qigong, meditation, acupuncture, and more, in a quest to improve her chances of conception. Along the way, she delved deep into spiritual healing practices, facing down demons of self-doubt and self-hatred, ultimately discovering an unconventional path to parenthood. In the end, to become a mother, Kowalski did everything she said she would never do. And she wouldn't change a thing. A story of personal triumph and unconditional love, Motherhood Reimagined reveals what happens when we release what's expected and embrace what's possible.
Author: Susan Bright
Publisher: Art / Books
ISBN: 9781908970107
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Published to coincide with an exhibition held at the Photographers' Gallery and Foundling Museum in London and touring to Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Photography, this beautiful and striking book examines contemporary interpretations of one of the most enduring subjects in the history of picture-making: the image of the mother. Focusing on the work of twelve international photographic artists, the publication challenges the stereotypical or sentimental views of motherhood handed down by traditional depictions, and explores how photography can be used to address changing conditions of power, gender, domesticity, the maternal body, and female identity. The work featured here is highly personal, often documentary in approach and with the individual subject at its centre, reflecting photography itself in the twenty-first century. The featured artists offer very different views of contemporary motherhood, from the devoted to the dysfunctional, representing the myriad ways that becoming - or even trying to become - a mother can radically alter a woman's sense of self and how others perceive her. The book's essays, illustrated with dozens of comparative images from antiquity to the present day, present the historical and contemporary context of the mother figure. Curator of the exhibitions and volume editor Susan Bright traces the history of photographs of motherhood from the nineteenth century to our 'postfeminist' age. Simon Watney weaves a fascinating narrative of the Madonna figure through the centuries. Nick Johnstone looks at the presentation of the mother from the perspective of the father, and considers how images of fatherhood compare, while Stephanie Chapman lays out the moving history of London's Foundling Museum through photographs and repositions the mother in a story of loss where she is strangely absent. Presenting contemporary thinking on motherhood through an exploration of its changing representation in photography, Home Truths provides a fresh and unique insight into one of the most universal and well documented of experiences.
Author: Torrey Peters
Publisher: One World
ISBN: 0593133390
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 369
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Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The lives of three women—transgender and cisgender—collide after an unexpected pregnancy forces them to confront their deepest desires in “one of the most celebrated novels of the year” (Time) “Reading this novel is like holding a live wire in your hand.”—Vulture One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century Named one of the Best Books of the Year by more than twenty publications, including The New York Times Book Review, Entertainment Weekly, NPR, Time, Vogue, Esquire, Vulture, and Autostraddle PEN/Hemingway Award Winner • Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Gotham Book Prize • Longlisted for The Women’s Prize • Roxane Gay’s Audacious Book Club Pick • New York Times Editors’ Choice Reese almost had it all: a loving relationship with Amy, an apartment in New York City, a job she didn't hate. She had scraped together what previous generations of trans women could only dream of: a life of mundane, bourgeois comforts. The only thing missing was a child. But then her girlfriend, Amy, detransitioned and became Ames, and everything fell apart. Now Reese is caught in a self-destructive pattern: avoiding her loneliness by sleeping with married men. Ames isn't happy either. He thought detransitioning to live as a man would make life easier, but that decision cost him his relationship with Reese—and losing her meant losing his only family. Even though their romance is over, he longs to find a way back to her. When Ames's boss and lover, Katrina, reveals that she's pregnant with his baby—and that she's not sure whether she wants to keep it—Ames wonders if this is the chance he's been waiting for. Could the three of them form some kind of unconventional family—and raise the baby together? This provocative debut is about what happens at the emotional, messy, vulnerable corners of womanhood that platitudes and good intentions can't reach. Torrey Peters brilliantly and fearlessly navigates the most dangerous taboos around gender, sex, and relationships, gifting us a thrillingly original, witty, and deeply moving novel.
Author: Gabrielle Zevin
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN: 1616207728
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 301
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Book Description
“SLY, EXHILARATING . . . HILARIOUS.” —People (Book of the Week) This is the story of five women . . . Meet Rachel Grossman. She’ll stop at nothing to protect her daughter, Aviva, even if it ends up costing her everything. Meet Jane Young. She’s disrupting a quiet life with her daughter, Ruby, to seek political office for the first time. Meet Ruby Young. She thinks her mom has a secret. She’s right. Meet Embeth Levin. She’s made a career of cleaning up her congressman husband’s messes. Meet Aviva Grossman. The Internet won’t let her or anyone else forget her past transgressions. This is the story of five women . . . . . . and the sex scandal that binds them together. From Gabrielle Zevin, the bestselling author of The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry, comes another story with unforgettable characters that is particularly suited to the times we live in now . . .
Author: Belle Boggs
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1555979459
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
A brilliant exploration of the natural, medical, psychological, and political facets of fertility When Belle Boggs's "The Art of Waiting" was published in Orion in 2012, it went viral, leading to republication in Harper's Magazine, an interview on NPR's The Diane Rehm Show, and a spot at the intersection of "highbrow" and "brilliant" in New York magazine's "Approval Matrix." In that heartbreaking essay, Boggs eloquently recounts her realization that she might never be able to conceive. She searches the apparently fertile world around her--the emergence of thirteen-year cicadas, the birth of eaglets near her rural home, and an unusual gorilla pregnancy at a local zoo--for signs that she is not alone. Boggs also explores other aspects of fertility and infertility: the way longing for a child plays out in the classic Coen brothers film Raising Arizona; the depiction of childlessness in literature, from Macbeth to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; the financial and legal complications that accompany alternative means of family making; the private and public expressions of iconic writers grappling with motherhood and fertility. She reports, with great empathy, complex stories of couples who adopted domestically and from overseas, LGBT couples considering assisted reproduction and surrogacy, and women and men reflecting on childless or child-free lives. In The Art of Waiting, Boggs deftly distills her time of waiting into an expansive contemplation of fertility, choice, and the many possible roads to making a life and making a family.
Author: Jennifer C. Nash
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478021721
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 149
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Book Description
In Birthing Black Mothers Black feminist theorist Jennifer C. Nash examines how the figure of the “Black mother” has become a powerful political category. “Mothering while Black” has become synonymous with crisis as well as a site of cultural interest, empathy, fascination, and support. Cast as suffering and traumatized by their proximity to Black death—especially through medical racism and state-sanctioned police violence—Black mothers are often rendered as one-dimensional symbols of tragic heroism. In contrast, Nash examines Black mothers’ self-representations and public performances of motherhood—including Black doulas and breastfeeding advocates alongside celebrities such as Beyoncé, Serena Williams, and Michelle Obama—that are not rooted in loss. Through cultural critique and in-depth interviews, Nash acknowledges the complexities of Black motherhood outside its use as political currency. Throughout, Nash imagines a Black feminist project that refuses the lure of locating the precarity of Black life in women and instead invites readers to theorize, organize, and dream into being new modes of Black motherhood.
Author: Elaine Tuttle Hansen
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520205789
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 300
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Book Description
"This is a conceptually innovative book which expands the meaning of motherhood to include mothers 'without child'; it is also a compassionate political book which refuses the boundary between 'good enough' and 'bad' mothers. Mother Without Child is an engaging, witty, and provocative literary study which should fascinate anyone who is interested in mothering or in looking for new ways to talk about motherhood without erasing some women's experience or dividing mothers from each other."--Sara Ruddick, author of Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace "Hansen positions her study in a genuinely new space . . . taboo ground, which demands not only a great deal of courage to address, but also enormous intelligence and insight. Hansen is up to this task. . . hers is a pioneer study that will have a significant impact on the ways that non-procreative motherhood is discussed and understood." --Madelon Sprengnether, author of The Spectral Mother: Freud, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis "Since the beginnings of the second wave of feminism in the 1960s, feminist scholars have been obsessed with motherhood. Mother Without Child takes us to the next stage in this fascinated and fascinating exploration. Through illuminating readings of contemporary stories of thwarted motherhood, Hansen challenges the persistent and constraining definitions of the good and even the good-enough mother. She enjoins us to listen to the moving, devastating, and often inspiring stories of mothers who survive the loss of their children and she urges us to find there not the angry voices of feminist daughters who cannot forgive their patriarchal mothers, but alternative stories of a different maternity that can lead us to alternative plots and visions of women's lives. We need this book."--Marianne Hirsch, author of The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism "A careful, committed, and freshly clarifying voice. Hansen's graceful prose and finely interwoven explorations are much needed at this time. Through readings of contemporary fiction, she enriches our vocabulary for discussing the overdetermined topic of motherhood and deepens our understanding of both its psychological and contemporary political dimensions. Mother Without Child is a book for historians and social scientists as well as literary scholars."--Laura Doyle, author of Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture
Author: Paula Birnbaum
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754669784
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
Incorporating recent theories of feminism and diaspora, Women Artists in Interwar France: Framing Femininities returns the Société des Femmes Artists Modernes, known as FAM, to its proper place in the history of modern art. Paula Birnbaum's study explores how FAM artists including Suzanne Valadon, Marie Laurencin, and Tamara de Lempicka, approached the self-portrait, motherhood and the female nude, as well as their response to marginalization and the reactionary politics of 1930s France.
Author: Elizabeth Weiss
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781734330304
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
Author: Sheila Heti
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
ISBN: 1627790780
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
From the author of How Should a Person Be? (“one of the most talked-about books of the year”—Time Magazine) and the New York Times Bestseller Women in Clothes comes a daring novel about whether to have children. In Motherhood, Sheila Heti asks what is gained and what is lost when a woman becomes a mother, treating the most consequential decision of early adulthood with the candor, originality, and humor that have won Heti international acclaim and made How Should A Person Be? required reading for a generation. In her late thirties, when her friends are asking when they will become mothers, the narrator of Heti’s intimate and urgent novel considers whether she will do so at all. In a narrative spanning several years, casting among the influence of her peers, partner, and her duties to her forbearers, she struggles to make a wise and moral choice. After seeking guidance from philosophy, her body, mysticism, and chance, she discovers her answer much closer to home. Motherhood is a courageous, keenly felt, and starkly original novel that will surely spark lively conversations about womanhood, parenthood, and about how—and for whom—to live.
