Maternal Subjectivity

Author : Alison Stone
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 216 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 2013-03-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781136593512

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Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal Subjectivity by Alison Stone Pdf

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.

Author : Mara H. Benjamin
Publisher : Indiana University Press
Page : 182 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2018-05-24
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780253034366

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The Obligated Self by Mara H. Benjamin Pdf

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.

Author : Nicole S. Berry
Publisher : Berghahn Books
Page : 260 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2010-10-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1845459962

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Unsafe Motherhood by Nicole S. Berry Pdf

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.

Author : Ellen L.K. Toronto
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 157 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2023-09-28
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9781000916935

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Maternal Subjectivity by Ellen L.K. Toronto Pdf

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.

Author : Rosalind Mayo,Christina Moutsou
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2016-10-04
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9781317503606

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The Mother in Psychoanalysis and Beyond by Rosalind Mayo,Christina Moutsou Pdf

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.

Author : Maura Sheehy
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 279 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2015-10-14
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9781317676935

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Women, Mothers, Subjects by Maura Sheehy Pdf

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.

Author : EL Putnam
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 241 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 2022-04-21
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781501364815

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The Maternal, Digital Subjectivity, and the Aesthetics of Interruption by EL Putnam Pdf

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.

Author : KMG Schreurs,L. Woerton,J. van Mens-Verhulst
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 192 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 2003-09-02
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9781134883646

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Daughtering and Mothering by KMG Schreurs,L. Woerton,J. van Mens-Verhulst Pdf

First published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Author : Amber Jacobs
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 235 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2007
Category : Law
ISBN : 9780231141543

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On Matricide by Amber Jacobs Pdf

Despite advances in feminism, the "law of the father" remains the dominant model of Western psychological and cultural analysis, and the law of the mother continues to exist as an underdeveloped and marginal concept. In her radical rereading of the Greek myth, Oresteia, Amber Jacobs hopes to rectify the occlusion of the mother and reinforce her role as an active agent in the laws that determine and reinforce our cultural organization. According to Greek myth, Metis, Athena's mother, was Zeus's first wife. Zeus swallowed Metis to prevent her from bearing children who would overthrow him. Nevertheless, Metis bore Zeus a child-Athena-who sprang forth fully formed from his head. In Aeschylus's Oresteia, Athena's motherless status functions as a crucial justification for absolving Orestes of the crime of matricide. In his defense of Orestes, Zeus argues that the father is more important than the mother, using Athena's "motherless" birth as an example. Conducting a close reading of critical works on Aeschylus's text, Jacobs reveals that psychoanalytic theorists have unwittingly reproduced the denial of Metis in their own critiques. This repression, which can be found in the work of Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein as well as in the work of more contemporary theorists such as André Green and Luce Irigaray, has resulted in both an incomplete analysis of Oresteia and an inability to account for the fantasies and unconscious processes that fall outside the oedipal/patricidal paradigm. By bringing the story of Athena's mother, Metis, to the forefront, Jacobs challenges the primacy of the Oedipus myth in Western culture and psychoanalysis and introduces a bold new theory of matricide and maternal law. She finds that the Metis myth exists in cryptic forms within Aeschylus's text, uncovering what she terms the "latent content of the Oresteian myth," and argues that the occlusion of the law of the mother is proof of the patriarchal structures underlying our contemporary social and psychic realities. Jacobs's work not only provides new insight into the Oresteian trilogy but also advances a postpatriarchal model of the symbolic order that has strong ramifications for psychoanalysis, feminism, and theories of representation, as well as for clinical practice and epistemology.

Author : Kelly Oliver
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Page : 225 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 1998-11-24
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781461642671

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Subjectivity Without Subjects by Kelly Oliver Pdf

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.

Author : Ellen L. K. Toronto
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2024
Category : Motherhood
ISBN : 1003413676

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Maternal Subjectivity by Ellen L. K. Toronto Pdf

"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"--

Author : Sherrie Spendlove Gallo
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 494 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 1997
Category : Electronic
ISBN : UCAL:X56966

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Maternal Subjectivity by Sherrie Spendlove Gallo Pdf

Author : Donna Bassin,Margaret Honey,Meryle Mahrer Kaplan
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 316 pages
File Size : 45,8 Mb
Release : 1994-01-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0300068638

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Representations of Motherhood by Donna Bassin,Margaret Honey,Meryle Mahrer Kaplan Pdf

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.

Author : Jane Van Buren
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 177 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2014-02-25
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9781317724285

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Mothers and Daughters and the Origins of Female Subjectivity by Jane Van Buren Pdf

Mothers and Daughters and the Origins of Female Subjectivity challenges the theory of the Oedipus complex, which permeates psychoanalytic theory, psychology, semiotics and cultural studies. The book focuses on the re-examination of women’s development through the theories of primitive mental states. Women’s subjectivity has been profoundly limited by continuing anxieties about the mother’s body. Jane Van Buren describes how women are gradually escaping the curse of inferiority and finding a voice, enabling the mother to provide their daughters with a legacy of rightful agency over their bodies and minds. Drawing on the theories of Klein, Bion and Winnicott, and incorporating recent developments in psychobiology, this book provides a novel approach to subjects including the dreams, myths and phantasies of individuals, the nature of mother and daughter relationships, sexuality, pregnancy, menstruation and the idea of the mother’s body as problematic and dangerous. This interdisciplinary investigation into curtailed female subjectivity and its many ramifications in society, culture and individual mental growth will be of great interest to all practising psychoanalysts, and those studying psychoanalytic theory and gender studies.

Author : Mary McCartin Wearn
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 283 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2007-11-13
Category : History
ISBN : 9781135860875

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Negotiating Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century American Literature by Mary McCartin Wearn Pdf

Returning to a foundational moment in the history of the American family, Negotiating Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century American Literature explores how various authors of the period represented the maternal role – an office that came to a new, social prominence at the end of the eighteenth century. By examining maternal figures in the works of diverse authors such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Sarah Piatt, this book exposes the contentious but fruitful negotiations that took place in the heart of the American sentimental era – negotiations about the cultural meanings of family, womanhood, and motherhood. This book, then, challenges critical constructions that figure American sentimentalism as a coherent, monolithic project, tied strictly to the forces of cultural conservatism. Furthermore, by exploring nineteenth-century challenges to conventional maternal ideology and by exposing gaps in the mythology of "ideal" motherhood, Negotiating Motherhood demonstrates that the icon of an American Madonna – a figure that still haunts America’s imagination – never had an uncontested reign. Transcending the boundaries of literary criticism, this work will be useful to feminist scholars and to those who are interested in the history of women’s culture, the American mythology of family life, or the cultural construction of motherhood.