Maternal Bodies

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.

Obesity is a rising global health problem. On the one hand a clearly defined medical condition, it is at the same time a corporeal state embedded in the social and cultural perception of fatness, body shape and size. Focusing specifically on the maternal body, contributors to the volume examine how the language and notions of obesity connect with, or stand apart from, wider societal values and moralities to do with the body, fatness, reproduction and what is considered 'natural'. A focus on fatness in the context of human reproduction and motherhood offers instructive insights into the global circulation and authority of biomedical facts on fatness (as 'risky' anti-fit, for example). As with other social and cultural studies critical of health policy discourse, this volume challenges the spontaneous connection being made in scientific and popular understanding between fatness and ill health.

Philosophy and the Maternal Body gives a new voice to the mother and the maternal body which have often been viewed as silent within philosophy. Michelle Boulous Walker clearly shows how some male theorists have appropriated maternity, and suggests new ways of articulating the maternal body and women's experience of pregnancy and motherhood.

"Epp Buller's and Reeve's anthology showcases an array of rich and diverse work. The three sections, 'Body Politics,' 'Family Practices' and 'By Design,' comprise overlapping yet distinct discussions of individual artists, critical theory, personal testaments, interviews and conversations, while employing a multiplicity of approaches to the still controversial discussion of the maternal body in visual art, performance and design. The design section was a revelation to me in its consideration of the constraints placed upon the maternal body in the constructed environment. Inappropriate Bodies is a welcome addition to the as yet under-represented field of maternal studies"--Provided by publisher.

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.

Over the past decade geographers have shown a growing interest in 'the body' as an important co-ordinate of subjectivity and as a way of understanding further relationships between people, place and space. To date, however geographers have published little on what is one of, if not the, most important of all bodies - bodies that conceive, give birth and nurture other bodies. It is time that feminist, social, and cultural geographers contributed more to debates about maternal bodies. This book offers a series of windows on the ways in which maternal bodies influence, and are influenced by, social and spatial processes. Topics covered include women ‘coming out’ as pregnant at work, changing fashion for pregnant women, being disabled and pregnant, the politics of home versus hospital birth, breastfeeding practices that sit outside the norm, women who are constructed as ‘bad’ mothers, and ‘e-mums’ (mothers who go on-line).

Maternal bodies in the visual arts brings images of the maternal and pregnant body into the centre of art historical enquiry. By exploring religious, secular and scientific traditions as well as contemporary art practices, it shows the power of visual imagery in framing our understanding of maternal bodies and affirming or contesting prevailing maternal ideals. This book reassesses these historical models and, in drawing on original case studies, shows how visual practices by artists may offer the means of reconfiguring the maternal. This book will appeal to students, academics and researchers in art history, gender studies and cultural studies, as well as to any readers with interests in the maternal and visual culture. It is based on visual case studies drawn from the UK, USA and Europe, which make it very attractive to an international readership. Maternal bodies in the visual arts is ideally placed to capture a growing post- and undergraduate market in maternal studies, which is beginning to emerge as a field of study in the UK and USA with courses in a wide range of social science and humanities disciplines now including the maternal as a key theme.

This is an ethnography which probes the intimate experience of gestational surrogate motherhood. Teman shows how surrogates and intended mothers carefully negotiate their cooperative endeavour.