Remembering Maternal Bodies

Remembering Maternal Bodies PDF Author: B. Trigo
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403983380
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
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.

Remembering Maternal Bodies

Remembering Maternal Bodies PDF Author: B. Trigo
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403983380
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Get Book Here

Book Description
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 PDF Author: Nora Doyle
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469637200
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
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.

Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution PDF Author: Adrienne Rich
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 039386734X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
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.

Womb Fantasies

Womb Fantasies PDF Author: Caroline Rupprecht
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810166631
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 149

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Book Description
Womb Fantasies examines the womb, an invisible and mysterious space invested with allegorical significance, as a metaphorical space in postwar cinematic and literary texts grappling with the trauma of post-holocaust, postmodern existence. In addition, it examines the representation of visible spaces in the texts in terms of their attribution with womb-like qualities. The framing of the study historically within the postwar era begins with a discussion of Eero Saarinen’s Womb Chair in the context of the Cold War’s need for safety in light of the threat of nuclear destruction, and ranges over films such as Marguerite Duras’ and Alan Resnais’ film Hiroshima mon amour and Duras’ novel The Vice-Consul, exploring the ways that such cultural texts fantasize the womb as a response to trauma, defined as the compulsive need to return to the site of loss, a place envisioned as both a secure space and a prison. The womb fantasy is linked to the desire to recreate an identity that is new and original but ahistorical.

Inappropriate Bodies Art, Design and Maternity

Inappropriate Bodies Art, Design and Maternity PDF Author: Buller Rachel Epp
Publisher: Demeter Press
ISBN: 1772582557
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
This edited collection examines conflicting assumptions, expectations, and perceptions of maternity in artistic, cultural, and institutional contexts. Over the past two decades, the maternal body has gained currency in popular culture and the contemporary art world, with many books and exhibitions foregrounding artists’ experiences and art historical explorations of maternity that previously were marginalized or dismissed. In too many instances, however, the maternal potential of female bodies—whether realized or not—still causes them to be stigmatized, censored, or otherwise treated as inappropriate: cultural expectations of maternity create one set of prejudices against women whose bodies or experiences do align with those same expectations, and another set of prejudices against those whose do not. Support for mothers in the paid workforce remains woefully inadequate, yet in many cultural contexts, social norms continue to ask what is “wrong” with women who do not have children. In these essays and conversations, artists and writers discuss how maternal expectations shape both creative work and designed environments, and highlight alternative ways of existing in relation to those expectations.

Motherhood Reimagined

Motherhood Reimagined PDF 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.

American Pietàs

American Pietàs PDF Author: Ruby C. Tapia
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816653100
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
What visual tropes of race, death, and motherhood tell us about citizenship.

Architexts of Memory

Architexts of Memory PDF Author: Evelyne Ender
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472031047
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Offers a powerful model that uses literature to help fathom the nature of remembrance

The Changing Face of Motherhood in Spain

The Changing Face of Motherhood in Spain PDF Author: Catherine Bourland Ross
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 1611487285
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
This book investigates the perceptions of motherhood in Spanish author Lucía Etxebarria’s fiction and offers views of the importance of motherhood in society. Traditional expectations for women as mothers persist despite the fact that they no longer match Spain’s cultural and economic reality. These issues of gender equality and societal perceptions stand out in the novels and screenplays of Etxebarria. Her work at times resists and at times affirms patriarchal constructs associated with traditional Spanish motherhood, and ultimately, I argue, enacts the very complexity of contemporary Spanish motherhood ideals. By showing the tension between the past constructs of the mother and the possible future outcomes of gender equality, Etxebarria’s works navigate the complexity between past and future, illuminating the current and future uncertainties and the ambivalent nature of change. Each chapter views motherhood from a different perspective and focuses on particular works of Etxebarria. Through the depiction of a variety of mother characters, these different perspectives, as showcased in Etxebarria’s narratives, together compose an understanding of Spanish maternal identity.

Representing Latina/x Reproductive Decision-Making

Representing Latina/x Reproductive Decision-Making PDF Author: Melissa Huerta
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793626987
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
Representing Latina/x Reproductive Decision Making examines representations of reproductive decisions in cultural texts and engages with scholarship on Latina/x representation to interrogate what these representations mean for Latinx popular culture. Melissa Huerta demonstrates that cultural texts ranging from the work of Teatro Luna and television series like Jane the Virgin and Vida to the film Quinceañera and Favianna Rodriguez’s artwork can challenge traditional notions of Latina/x reproductive decisions, pointing to more inclusive understandings of people’s experiences. Huerta argues for the importance of cultural representation in theater, television, film and art and analyzes the roles language and images play in shaping meaning. This book will be of interest to scholars of cultural studies, gender studies, Latin American studies, and film and media studies.