Download or read book Troubling Motherhood written by Lucy B. Hall and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In global politics, women's bodies are policed, objectified, surveilled, and feared, with particular attention paid to both their met or unmet procreative potential. While the significance of motherhood varies across cultures, it is, as this book argues, connected not just to gender and sexuality, but also to religion and nationality. Reproduction is central to the flourishing of any nation or culture, and therefore motherhood is a major signifier of women's relationship to the state. This is so much the case that states enact laws about which women can bear children and have supported sterilization efforts in cases where women are not deemed appropriate bearers of the nation. States also legislate reproductive technologies, adoption, and government support for parenting. By considering representations and narratives of maternity, this volume shows how practices of global politics shape and are shaped by the gendered norms and institutions that underpin motherhood. Motherhood matters in global politics. Yet, the diverse ways in which performances and practices of motherhood are constituted by and are constitutive of other dimensions of political life are frequently obscured, or assumed to be of little interest to scholars, policymakers, and practitioners. Featuring innovative and diverse chapters on the politics of motherhood as an institution, this collection shows that maternality is troubled, complicated, and heterogeneous in global politics. Thus, performances and practices of motherhood warrant closer and more sustained scrutiny. This book builds on work by feminist international relations scholars, extending into disruptive spaces of queer theory, literary critique, and post-colonial studies. The chapters in this book consider the meaning of motherhood, particularly during times of war versus peace; the connections between motherhood and nationhood (and reproduction of the state); and care work and maternal labor, particularly as performed by transnational workers. Ultimately, this book demonstrates the complex interconnections between the individual, the state, and the global through the lens of maternality.
Download or read book Monstrous Mothers Troubling Tropes written by Andrea O'Reilly and published by Demeter Press. This book was released on 2021-08-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Motherhood is one of those roles that assumes an almost-outsized cultural importance in the significance we force it to bear. It becomes both the source of and the repository for all kinds of cultural fears. Its ubiquity perhaps makes it this perfect foil. After all, while not everyone will become a mother, everyone has a mother. When we force motherhood to bear the terrors of what it means to be human, we inflict trauma upon those who mother. A long tradition of bad mothers thus shapes contemporary mothering practices (and the way we view them), including the murderous Medea of Greek mythology, the power-hungry Queen Gertrude of Hamlet, and the emasculating mother of Freud's theories. Certainly, there are mother who cause harm, inflict abuse, act monstrously. Mothers are human. But mothers are also a favourite and easy scapegoat. The contributors to this collection explore a multitude of interdisciplinary representations of mothers that, through their very depictions of bad mothering, challenge the tropes of monstrous mothering that we lean on, revealing in the process why we turn to them. Chapters in Monstrous Mothers: Troubling Tropes explore literary, cinematic, and real-life monstrous mothers, seeking to uncover social sources and results of these monstrosities.
Download or read book Troubling Maternity written by Emily Jeremiah and published by MHRA. This book was released on 2003 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The question of maternity is crucial for feminists, to whom it represents both challenge and inspiration, as it is for many thinkers engaged with the issues of agency, corporeality, and ethics. This examination puts forward the idea of a 'maternal performativity', drawing on the work of Judith Butler and numerous other feminist theorists, to offer new ways of looking at 1970s and 1980s literary texts by ten German-speaking women writers, including Barbara Frischmuth, Elfriede Jelinek, Irmtraud Morgner, and Karin Struck. It argues that as yet, maternal agency has not adequately been theorized - a project which is urgent, given the traditional view in Western culture of the mother as passive - and suggests that Butler's notion of performativity can assist in this task. It proposes a performative conception of both mothering and literature, and links both of these to the question of ethics, which is understood as involving embodiment and relationality. To different extents, all of the texts examined depict mothers as marginal, abject, or insane, thus demonstrating the operations of exclusion, and the need for a maternal agency to be developed and enacted. The idea of maternal performativity is refined in five chapters, which focus, respectively, on community, corporeality, the mother-child relationship, the family, and discursive production. The conclusion explores the ethics of literary practice and knowledge production, and argues that in the light of the developing fields of new reproductive technologies and genetics, it is imperative that we seek new understandings of embodiment, community, and care, a task to which this study aspires to contribute.
Download or read book Recreating Motherhood written by Barbara Katz Rothman and published by W. W. Norton. This book was released on 1990 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Motherhood written by Sheila Heti and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Mothers written by Jacqueline Rose and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A simple argument guides this book: motherhood is the place in our culture where we lodge, or rather bury, the reality of our own conflicts. By making mothers the objects of both licensed idealization and cruelty, we blind ourselves to the world’s iniquities and shut down the portals of the heart. Mothers are the ultimate scapegoat for our personal and political failings, for everything that is wrong with the world, which becomes their task (unrealizable, of course) to repair. Moving commandingly between pop cultural references such as Roald Dahl’s Matilda to insights on motherhood in the ancient world and the contemporary stigmatization of single mothers, Jacqueline Rose delivers a groundbreaking report into something so prevalent we hardly notice. Mothers is an incisive, rousing call to action from one of our most important contemporary thinkers.
Download or read book The Confident Mom written by Joyce Meyer and published by FaithWords. This book was released on 2014-01-21 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Coach, cheerleader, confidant, chef and chauffeur -- the job description of a mom is as broad as the horizon. Perhaps this is why so many mothers deal with insecurity and uncertainty as they do their best to raise their children in a challenging and ever-changing world. If you've ever gone to bed disappointed with yourself, if you've ever felt like you weren't measuring up, or if you've ever wished there was a manual for motherhood, #1 New York Times bestselling author Joyce Meyer has just the book for you. In The Confident Mom you will be encouraged that you are not alone -- God is with you and He wants to help you with the challenges you face each day. Through inspiring stories, Biblical principles and Joyce's own valuable life lessons, there is no doubt you will discover the path to a new confidence and joy in motherhood. No matter your age, the size of your family, or the circumstances you find yourself in, The Confident Mom will help you become the joyful, confident mother God created you to be!
Download or read book Motherhood is Murder written by Diana Orgain and published by Diana Orgain. This book was released on 2020-06-13 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the USA Today Bestselling Author of Bundle of Trouble A fun new installment to the Maternal Instincts Mystery Series Nights out are hard to come by for new parents. So when Kate's new- mommy club, Roo & You, holds a dinner cruise, she and her husband leave baby Laurie with Kate's mom and join the grown-ups for some fine dining on the San Francisco Bay. But when one of the cofounders of Roo & You takes a fatal spill down a staircase, the police department crashes the party. Suddenly every mom and her man has a motive. Kate's on deck to solve the mystery- but a killer's determined to make her rue the day she joined the first-time-mom's club… To Do: 1. Buy diapers. 2. Make Laurie's two-month check. 3. Find good "how to" book for PI business. 4. x Find dress for the cruise (done) 5. x Ask Mom to babysit (done) 6. Exercise.
Download or read book What No One Tells You written by Alexandra Sacks and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2019-04-23 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Your guide to the emotions of pregnancy and early motherhood, from two of America’s top reproductive psychiatrists. When you are pregnant, you get plenty of advice about your growing body and developing baby. Yet so much about motherhood happens in your head. What everyone really wants to know: Is this normal? -Even after months of trying, is it normal to panic after finding out you’re pregnant? -Is it normal not to feel love at first sight for your baby? -Is it normal to fight with your parents and partner? -Is it normal to feel like a breastfeeding failure? -Is it normal to be zonked by “mommy brain?” In What No One Tells You, two of America’s top reproductive psychiatrists reassure you that the answer is yes. With thirty years of combined experience counseling new and expectant mothers, they provide a psychological and hormonal backstory to the complicated emotions that women experience, and show why it’s natural for “matrescence”—the birth of a mother—to be as stressful and transformative a period as adolescence. Here, finally, is the first-ever practical guide to help new mothers feel less guilt and more self-esteem, less isolation and more kinship, less resentment and more intimacy, less exhaustion and more pleasure, and learn other tips to navigate the ups and downs of this exciting, demanding time
Download or read book Constructing Motherhood Identity Against Political Violence written by Deniz Ülke Arıboğan and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-09-23 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers a nuanced understanding of female agency in political violence by reviewing and analyzing the political construction of motherhood as a form of social agency against political violence committed by both state and non-state actors in different parts of the world. While the international relations discipline has traditionally viewed the relationship between women and violent actors as an exploitative one, this book demonstrates that taking maternal bodies seriously creates important intellectual space to examine the types and kinds of violence the discipline of IR takes seriously and the types and kinds of resistance practiced by mothers but often overlooked (at least by male/mainstream IR). Focusing on motherhood as an agency of change, this volume will appeal to scholars in the field of gender and international security, think tanks working on political and security affairs, social activists, policymakers, an interested public audience, as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students undertaking study or research associated with gender and political violence.
Download or read book Mothering a Bodied Curriculum written by Stephanie Springgay and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2012-02-10 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection considers how embodiment, mothering, and curriculum theory are related to practices in education that silence, conceal, and limit gendered, raced, and sexual maternal bodies. Advancing a new understanding of the maternal body, it argues for a 'bodied curriculum' – a practice that attends to the relational, social, and ethical implications of ‘being-with’ other bodies differently, and to the different knowledges such bodily encounters produce. Contributors argue that the prevailing silence about the maternal body in educational scholarship reinforces the binary split between domestic and public spaces, family life and work, one's own children and others' children, and women's roles as ‘mothers’ or ‘others.’ Providing an interdisciplinary perspective in which postmodern ideas about the body interact with those of learning and teaching, Mothering a Bodied Curriculum brings theory and practice together into an ever-evolving conversation.
Download or read book I Was a Really Good Mom Before I Had Kids written by Trisha Ashworth and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2010-07-01 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I don't know how she does it! is an oft-heard refrain about mothers today. Funnily enough, most moms agree they have no idea how they get it done, or whether they even want the job. Trisha Ashworth and Amy Nobile spoke to mothers of every stripe--working, stay-at-home, part-time--and found a surprisingly similar trend in their interviews. After enthusing about her lucky life for twenty minutes, a mother would then break down and admit that her child's first word was "Shrek." As one mom put it, "Am I happy? The word that describes me best is challenged." Fresh from the front lines of modern motherhood comes a book that uncovers the guilty secrets of moms today . . . in their own words. I Was a Really Good Mom Before I Had Kids diagnoses the craziness and offers real solutions, so that mothers can step out of the madness and learn to love motherhood as much as they love their kids.
Download or read book Perfect Madness written by Judith Warner and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2006-02-07 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lively and provocative look at the modern culture of motherhood and at the social, economic, and political forces that shaped current ideas about parenting What is wrong with this picture? That's the question Judith Warner asks in this national bestseller after taking a good, hard look at the world of modern parenting--at anxious women at work and at home and in bed with unhappy husbands. When Warner had her first child, she was living in Paris, where parents routinely left their children home, with state-subsidized nannies, to join friends in the evening for dinner or to go on dates with their husbands. When she returned to the States, she was stunned by the cultural differences she found toward how people think about effective parenting--in particular, assumptions about motherhood. None of the mothers she met seemed happy; instead, they worried about the possibility of not having the perfect child, panicking as each developmental benchmark approached. Combining close readings of mainstream magazines, TV shows, and pop culture with a thorough command of dominant ideas in recent psychological, social, and economic theory, Perfect Madness addresses our cultural assumptions, and examines the forces that have shaped them. Working in the tradition of classics like Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique and Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism, and with an awareness of a readership that turned recent hits like The Bitch in the House and Allison Pearson's I Don't Know How She Does It into bestsellers, Warner offers a context in which to understand parenting culture and the way we live, as well as ways of imagining alternatives--actual concrete changes--that might better our lives.
Download or read book Love and Trouble written by Claire Dederer and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2017-05-09 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blazingly intelligent, wickedly funny, and piercingly honest, a memoir that captures the perils and pleasures of girlhood, womanhood, and life itself. “One of my favorite books of the last few years.” —Cheryl Strayed “Sentence for sentence, a more pleasure-yielding midlife memoir is hard to think of.” —The Atlantic At mid-life, Claire Dederer developed a sudden yearning for jailbreak. In this exuberant memoir, she reflects on two periods in her life uncannily similar in their emotional intensity: her present experience as a middle-aged mom in the grip of unruly and mysterious new hungers, and her recollections of herself as a teenager.
Download or read book Bundle of Trouble written by Diana Orgain and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2009-08-04 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Cigars all around"( LOUISE URE, SHAMUS AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR) for the new Maternal Instincts mystery series. First-time mom Kate Connelly is bringing up baby- and bringing down a killer. Kate Connelly may have found the perfect work-from-home Mommy job: private investigator. After all, the hours are flexible, she can bring the baby along on stake-outs, and if you're going to be up all night anyway, you might as well solve some crimes. But when a body is pulled from San Francisco Bay that may be her brother-in-law, Kate must crack the case faster than you can say "diaper rash" in order to keep her family together.
Download or read book Small Animals written by Kim Brooks and published by Flatiron Books. This book was released on 2018-08-21 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "It might be the most important book about being a parent that you will ever read." —Emily Rapp Black, New York Times bestselling author of The Still Point of the Turning World "Brooks's own personal experience provides the narrative thrust for the book — she writes unflinchingly about her own experience.... Readers who want to know what happened to Brooks will keep reading to learn how the case against her proceeds, but it's Brooks's questions about why mothers are so judgmental and competitive that give the book its heft." —NPR One morning, Kim Brooks made a split-second decision to leave her four-year old son in the car while she ran into a store. What happened would consume the next several years of her life and spur her to investigate the broader role America’s culture of fear plays in parenthood. In Small Animals, Brooks asks, Of all the emotions inherent in parenting, is there any more universal or profound than fear? Why have our notions of what it means to be a good parent changed so radically? In what ways do these changes impact the lives of parents, children, and the structure of society at large? And what, in the end, does the rise of fearful parenting tell us about ourselves? Fueled by urgency and the emotional intensity of Brooks’s own story, Small Animals is a riveting examination of the ways our culture of competitive, anxious, and judgmental parenting has profoundly altered the experiences of parents and children. In her signature style—by turns funny, penetrating, and always illuminating—which has dazzled millions of fans and been called "striking" by New York Times Book Review and "beautiful" by the National Book Critics Circle, Brooks offers a provocative, compelling portrait of parenthood in America and calls us to examine what we most value in our relationships with our children and one another.
Download or read book Motherhood So White written by Nefertiti Austin and published by Sourcebooks, Inc.. This book was released on 2019-09-20 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story every mother in America needs to read. As featured on NPR and the TODAY Show. All moms have to deal with choosing baby names, potty training, finding your village, and answering your kid's tough questions, but if you are raising a Black child, you have to deal with a lot more than that. Especially if you're a single Black mom... and adopting. Nefertiti Austin shares her story of starting a family through adoption as a single Black woman. In this unflinching account of her parenting journey, Nefertiti examines the history of adoption in the African American community, faces off against stereotypes of single Black moms, and confronts the reality of what it looks like to raise children of color and answer their questions about racism in modern-day America. Honest, vulnerable, and uplifting, Motherhood So White is a fantastic book for mothers who have read White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi, Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? by Beverly Daniel Tatum, or other books about racism and want to see how these social issues play out in a very personal way for a single mom and her Black son. This great book club read explores social and cultural bias, gives a new perspective on a familiar experience, and sparks meaningful conversations about what it looks like for Black families in white America today.
