Maternal Pasts Feminist Futures

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Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures

Author : Lynne Huffer
Publisher : Stanford University Press
Page : 212 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 1998
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780804730266

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Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures by Lynne Huffer Pdf

This book examines the relations among nostalgia, gender, and foundational philosophies through a critique of the lost mother as a ground for thinking about sexual difference. More specifically, the author critiques the nostalgic tendencies of feminist theory, arguing that an emancipatory system of thought must move beyond a maternally oriented structure. Through close readings of works by Maurice Blanchot, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Nicole Brossard, the book elucidates the many dimensions of nostalgic paradigms—literary, psychoanalytic, epistemological, ontological, and sociopolitical. This critique ultimately confronts postmodernism, and especially the burgeoning field of performative theory, as an intellectual paradigm that claims to subvert systems of meaning. Analyzing the writings of J. L. Austin, Judith Butler, and Irigaray, the author argues that despite its antinostalgic structure, performative theory provides an inadequate model for understanding the connections among language, identity, and the social bonds that constitute the ethical and political sphere. Asserting, through the example of performative theory, that a critique is not enough, the book examines the possibility of a constructive model that is both non-nostalgic and informed by ethical constraints. One such model is offered through a reading of the Quebecois writer Nicole Brossard, which explores her work in relation to the question of lesbian writing. Demystifying nostalgia, Brossard not only uncovers and subverts the structures through which a concept of origins is produced, but also provides a different, visionary way of thinking about the relationship between subjectivity and language. Finally, the book argues for further feminist work on the relationship between narrative and ethics, a field whose future lies in the elaboration of a bridge between the moral commitments of ethical theory and the fractured realities that find their expression in literary forms.

Maternal Impressions

Author : Cristina Mazzoni
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 2002
Category : Health & Fitness
ISBN : 0801440351

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Maternal Impressions by Cristina Mazzoni Pdf

In an unusual combination of reflection, autobiography, theory, and criticism, Cristina Mazzoni looks at childbirth and early maternity from the perspective of an academic mother with three young children. Mazzoni draws upon examples ranging from contemporary advice manuals and novels to the work of turn-of-the-century Italian scientists and women writers, as well as fairy tales, religious texts, psychoanalytic accounts, and feminist theory. Throughout her investigations of the various forces that shape cultural views of pregnancy and childbirth, Mazzoni strives to imagine and deploy maternity as a concept and a reality capable of challenging conventional representations of subjectivity. The questions she addresses dwell on relationship and interdependence, the inseparability of the personal and the political, and the connections and interactions between bodies and power. Maternal Impressions is far more than a book of literary criticism and theory. It reveals the multiple bonds and continuities between the contradictory ways in which pregnancy and childbirth were represented a century ago and the manner in which they still haunt feminist experience today. In her conclusion, Mazzoni points toward a possible ethics of maternity.

Gender and Archiving: Past, Present, Future

Author : Noortje Willems
Publisher : Uitgeverij Verloren
Page : 176 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2017
Category : Feminism
ISBN : 9789087046514

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Gender and Archiving: Past, Present, Future by Noortje Willems Pdf

This 37th volume of the Yearbook of Women's History focuses on the meaning and potential of archiving for enhancing gender equality and the position of women worldwide. More than just storehouses of knowledge, archives offer new ways for understanding the past, debating the present and creating the future. Focusing on both traditional and non-traditional archival practices, in various parts of the world, the Yearbook of Women’s History explores the meaning of archiving for women and women’s history. Besides investigating the feminist potential of the archive, it also examines questions of erasure and forgetting. While archives may have emancipatory or democratizing potential, practices of discarding equally shape the histories that can be written, and the stories that can be told. The articles in this volume are alternated with descriptions of collections and institutes, and the topics addressed cover a full range of archival theory and practice. This volume has been produced by the editorial board of the Yearbook of Women's History in collaboration with Atria, institute on gender equality and women's history in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Thinking through the Mothers

Author : Janet Beizer
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 585 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2011-03-15
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780801457128

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Thinking through the Mothers by Janet Beizer Pdf

If questions of subjectivity and identification are at stake in all biographical writing, they are particularly trenchant for contemporary women biographers of women. Often, their efforts to exhume buried lives in hope of finding spiritual foremothers awaken maternal phantoms that must be embraced or confronted. Do women writing in fact have any greater access to their own mothers' lives than to the lives of other women whose stories have been swept away like dust in the debris of the past? In Thinking through the Mothers, Janet Beizer surveys modern women's biographies and contemplates alternatives to an approach based in lineage and the form of thought that emphasizes the line, the path, hierarchy, unity, resemblance, reflection, and the aesthetic-mimesis-that depends on these ideas. Through close readings of memoirs and fictions about mothers, Beizer explores how biographers of the women who came before rehearse and rewrite relationships to their own mothers biographically as they seek to appropriate the past in a hybrid genre she calls "bio-autography." Thinking through the Mothers features the work of George Sand and Colette and spans such varied figures as Gustave Flaubert, Julian Barnes, Louise Colet, Eunice Lipton, Vladimir Nabokov, Huguette Bouchardeau, and Christa Wolf. Beizer seeks an alternative to women's "salvation biography" or "resurrection biography" that might resist nostalgia, be attentive to silence, and reinvent the means to represent the lives of precursors without appropriating traditional models of genealogy.

Undomesticated Ground

Author : Stacy Alaimo
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 239 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 2019-01-24
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781501720468

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Undomesticated Ground by Stacy Alaimo Pdf

From "Mother Earth" to "Mother Nature," women have for centuries been associated with nature. Feminists, troubled by the way in which such representations show women controlled by powerful natural forces and confined to domestic space, have sought to distance themselves from nature. In Undomesticated Ground, Stacy Alaimo issues a bold call to reclaim nature as feminist space. Her analysis of a remarkable range of feminist writings—as well as of popular journalism, visual arts, television, and film—powerfully demonstrates that nature has been and continues to be an essential concept for feminist theory and practice.Alaimo urges feminist theorists to rethink the concept of nature by probing the vastly different meanings that it carries. She discusses its significance for Americans engaged in social and political struggles from, for example, the "Indian Wars" of the early nineteenth century, to the birth control movement in the 1920s, to contemporary battles against racism and heterosexism. Reading works by Catherine Sedgwick, Mary Austin, Emma Goldman, Nella Larson, Donna Haraway, Toni Morrison, and others, Alaimo finds that some of these writers strategically invoke nature for feminist purposes while others cast nature as a postmodern agent of resistance in the service of both environmentalism and the women's movement.By examining the importance of nature within literary and political texts, this book greatly expands the parameters of the nature writing genre and establishes nature as a crucial site for the cultural work of feminism.

Maternal Conceptions in Classical Literature and Philosophy

Author : Alison Sharrock,Alison Keith
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
Page : 395 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2020-01-29
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781487532031

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Maternal Conceptions in Classical Literature and Philosophy by Alison Sharrock,Alison Keith Pdf

Unlike many studies of the family in the ancient world, this volume presents readings of mothers in classical literature, including philosophical and epigraphic writing as well as poetic texts. Rather than relying on a male viewpoint, the essays offer a female perspective on the lifecycle of motherhood. Although almost all ancient authors are men, this book nevertheless aims to carefully unpack the role of the mother – not as projected by the son or other male relations, but from a woman’s own experiences – in order to better understand how they perceived themselves and their families. Because the primary interest is in the mothers themselves, rather than the authors of the texts in which they appear, the work is organized according to the lifecycle of motherhood instead of the traditional structure of the chronology of male authors. The chronology of the male authors ranges from classical Greece to late antiquity, while the motherly lifecycle ranges from pre-conception to the commemoration of offspring who have died before their mothers.

Mothers of Invention

Author : Miléna Santoro
Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Page : 372 pages
File Size : 54,6 Mb
Release : 2002
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0773524878

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Mothers of Invention by Miléna Santoro Pdf

Mothers of Invention draws together innovative works of fiction written by French and Quebec feminists in the mid-1970s. Through an analysis of the strategies adopted by Hlne Cixous, Madeleine Gagnon, Nicole Brossard, and Jeanne Hyvrard as they rework maternal and (pro)creative metaphors and play with language and conventions of genre, Milna Santoro identifies a transatlantic community of women writers who share a subversive aesthetic that participates in, even as it transforms, the tradition of the avant-garde in twentieth-century literature. Santoro elucidates notoriously difficult works by the four "mothers of invention" studied - Cixous and Hyvrard from France, and Gagnon and Brossard from Quebec - showing how the rethinking of images associated with femininity and motherhood, a disruptive approach to language, and a subversive relation to novelistic conventions characterize these writers' search for a writing that will best express women's desires and dreams. Mothers of Invention situates such ideologically motivated textual practices within the avant-garde tradition, even as it suggests how women's experimental writings collectively transform our understanding of that tradition. Santoro makes clear the shared ethical and aesthetic commitments that nourished a transatlantic community whose contribution to mainstream literature and cultural productions, including postmodernism, is still being felt today.

Motherhood

Author : Andrea O'Reilly,Marie Porter,Patricia Short
Publisher : Canadian Scholars’ Press
Page : 318 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2005-08-25
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780889614543

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Motherhood by Andrea O'Reilly,Marie Porter,Patricia Short Pdf

In feminism, the institution of mothering/motherhood has been a highly contested area in how it relates to the oppression of women. As Adrienne Rich articulated in her classic 1976 book Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, although motherhood as an institution is a male-defined site of oppression, women's own experiences of mothering can nonetheless be a source of power. This volume examines four locations wherin motherhood is simultaneously experienced as a site of oppression and of power: emodiment, representation, practice, and separation. Motherhood: Power and Oppression includes psychological, historical, sociological, literary, and cultural approaches to inquiry and a wide range of disciplinary perspectives — qualitative, quantitative, corporeal, legal, religious, fictional, mythological, dramatic and action research. This rich collection not only covers a wide range of subject matter but also illustrates ways of doing feminist research and practice.

Maternal Echoes

Author : Aimée Boutin
Publisher : University of Delaware Press
Page : 260 pages
File Size : 53,7 Mb
Release : 2001
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0874137276

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Maternal Echoes by Aimée Boutin Pdf

'Maternal Echoes' examines maternal imagery in the poetry of two French Romantic poets, the increasingly popular Desbordes-Valmore and the critically marginalized Lamartine. Drawing on psychoanalytic theories on the maternal voice as well as feminist criticism, the book argues that both poets find a voice of their own by echoing their mother's voice.

Mothers in the Jewish Cultural Imagination

Author : Marjorie Lehman,Jane L. Kanarek,Simon J. Bronner
Publisher : Liverpool University Press
Page : 415 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2017-08-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781786948533

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Mothers in the Jewish Cultural Imagination by Marjorie Lehman,Jane L. Kanarek,Simon J. Bronner Pdf

Most Jews will feel intimately familiar with and attached to the figure of the ‘Jewish mother’, yet few have questioned representations of mothers and motherhood in Jewish culture. This volume aims to fill this gap by bringing to the fore the vast network of symbols and images which Jews have associated with mothers from the Bible to the modern period. It demonstrates the complex ways in which the Jewish mother has been used to construct and frame Jewish religion and culture.

Modernism, Self-Creation, and the Maternal

Author : James Martell
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 200 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2019-07-01
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780429575259

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Modernism, Self-Creation, and the Maternal by James Martell Pdf

Focusing on their conception and use of the notion of the mother, Modernism, Self-Creation, and the Maternal proposes a new interpretation of literature by modernist authors like Rousseau, Baudelaire, Poe, Rimbaud, Rilke, Joyce, and Beckett. Seen through this maternal relation, their writing appears as the product of an "anxiety" rising not from paternal influence, but from the violence done to their mother in their attempts at self-creation through writing. In order to bring to light this modernist violence, this study analyzes these authors in tandem with Derrida’s work on the gender-specific violence of the Western philosophical and literary tradition. The book demonstrates how these writer-sons wrote their works in a constant crisis vis-à-vis the mother’s body as site of both origin and dissolution. It proves how, if modernism was first established as a patrilineal heritage, it was ultimately written on the bodies of women and mothers, confusing them in order to appropriate their generative traits.

Liberty, Equality, Maternity

Author : Alison Fell
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 2017-12-02
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781351197618

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Liberty, Equality, Maternity by Alison Fell Pdf

"The concept of motherhood emerges strongly in the writings of Simone de Beauvoir, Violette Leduc and Annie Ernaux, whose work is examined here in the light of current debates about women's reproductive function and the longstanding glorification of the mere au foyer in France, driven by fear of a falling population. In this interdisciplinary study of twentieth-century French women's writing, Fell uncovers tensions at the heart of the literary critique. She shows these authors challenging the patriarchal view of motherhood as the sole justification for a woman's existence while at the same time confronting the conflict inherent in their relationship with their own mothers. A survey of theoretical and historical material demonstrates vividly that the changing concept of motherhood remains a problematic and highly contentious issue for French feminists, whether writing in 1940 or 1999."

The Theorist's Mother

Author : Andrew Parker
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 202 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2012-03-23
Category : Family & Relationships
ISBN : 9780822352327

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The Theorist's Mother by Andrew Parker Pdf

Andrew Parker undertakes a critical reconsideration of the frequently absent, or troubled, figure of the mother in theorists including Marx, Freud, Lacan, and Derrida.

Are the Lips a Grave?

Author : Lynne Huffer
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 259 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2013-10-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780231535779

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Are the Lips a Grave? by Lynne Huffer Pdf

Lynne Huffer's ambitious inquiry redresses the rift between feminist and queer theory, traversing the space of a new, post-moral sexual ethics that includes pleasure, desire, connection, and betrayal. She begins by balancing queer theorists' politics of sexual freedoms with a moralizing feminist politics that views sexuality as harm. Drawing on the best insights from both traditions, she builds an ethics centered on eros, following Michel Foucault's ethics as a practice of freedom and Luce Irigaray's lyrical articulation of an ethics of sexual difference. Through this theoretical lens, Huffer examines everyday experiences of ethical connection and failure connected to sex, including queer sexual practices, sodomy laws, interracial love, pornography, and work-life balance. Her approach complicates sexual identities while challenging the epistemological foundations of subjectivity. She rethinks ethics "beyond good and evil" without underestimating, as some queer theorists have done, the persistence of what Foucault calls the "catastrophe" of morality. Elaborating a thinking-feeling ethics of the other, Huffer encourages contemporary intellectuals to reshape sexual morality from within, defining an ethical space that is both poetically suggestive and politically relevant, both conceptually daring and grounded in common sexual experience.

Revolutionary Time

Author : Fanny Söderbäck
Publisher : SUNY Press
Page : 416 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2019-12-01
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781438476995

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Revolutionary Time by Fanny Söderbäck Pdf

Examines the relationship between time and sexual difference in the work of French feminists Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. This book is the first to examine the relationship between time and sexual difference in the work of Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. Because of their association with reproduction, embodiment, and the survival of the species, women have been confined to the cyclical time of nature—a temporal model that is said to merely repeat itself. Men, on the other hand, have been seen as bearers of linear time and as capable of change and progress. Fanny Söderbäck argues that both these temporal models make change impossible because they either repeat or repress the past. The model of time developed here—revolutionary time—aims at returning to and revitalizing the past so as to make possible a dynamic-embodied present and a future pregnant with change. Söderbäck stages an unprecedented conversation between Kristeva and Irigaray on issues of both time and difference, and engages thinkers such as Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud, Judith Butler, Hannah Arendt, and Plato along the way. “Revolutionary Time makes a distinctive contribution to contemporary feminist and continental philosophical thought. By engaging Kristeva and Irigaray in depth alongside one another, and making time the guiding thread for reading their work, the author generates insights that are not to be found elsewhere in the existing literature. Through its development of the concept of revolutionary time, the book offers rich resources for thinking about temporalization in its existential, ontological, and political dimensions, in ways that are particularly valuable for feminist projects of change and political transformation.” — Rachel Jones, author of Irigaray: Towards a Sexuate Philosophy