Reassembling Motherhood

The word “mother” traditionally meant a woman who bears and nurtures a child. In recent decades, changes in social norms and public policy as well as advances in reproductive technologies and the development of markets for procreation and care have radically expanded definitions of motherhood. But while maternity has become a matter of choice for more women, the freedom to make reproductive decisions is unevenly distributed. Restrictive policies, socioeconomic disadvantages, cultural mores, and discrimination force some women into motherhood and prevent others from caring for their children. Reassembling Motherhood brings together contributors from across the disciplines to consider the transformation of motherhood as both an identity and a role. It examines how the processes of bearing and rearing a child are being restructured as reproductive labor and care work change around the globe. The authors examine issues such as artificial reproductive technologies, surrogacy, fetal ultrasounds, adoption, nonparental care, and the legal status of kinship, showing how complex chains of procreation and childcare have simultaneously generated greater liberty and new forms of constraint. Emphasizing the tension between the liberalization of procreation and care on the one hand, and the limits to their democratization due to race, class, and global inequality on the other, the book highlights debates that have emerged as these multifaceted changes have led to both the fragmentation and reassembling of motherhood.

In 1978 the world’s first “test-tube baby” was born from in vitro fertilization (IVF), effectively ushering in a paradigm shift for infertility treatment that relied on partially disembodied human reproduction. Beyond IVF, the ability to extract, fertilize, and store reproductive cells outside of the human body has created new opportunities for family building, but also prompted new conflicts about rights to and control over reproductive cells. In collaborative forms of reproduction that build on IVF technologies, such as egg and embryo donation and gestational surrogacy, multiple women may variously contribute to conception, gestation/birth, and the legal and social responsibilities for rearing a child, creating intentionally fragmented maternities. Undoing Motherhood examines the implications of such fragmented maternities in the post-IVF reproductive era for generating maternity uncertainty—an increasing cultural ambiguity about what does and should constitute maternity. Undoing Motherhood explores this uncertainty in the social worlds of reproductive medicine and law.

The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Economics presents a comprehensive overview of the contributions of feminist economics to the discipline of economics and beyond. Each chapter situates the topic within the history of the field, reflects upon current debates, and looks forward to identify cutting-edge research. Consistent with feminist economics’ goal of strong objectivity, this Handbook compiles contributions from different traditions in feminist economics (including but not limited to Marxian political economy, institutionalist economics, ecological economics and neoclassical economics) and from different disciplines (such as economics, philosophy and political science). The Handbook delineates the social provisioning methodology and highlights its insights for the development of feminist economics. The contributors are a diverse mix of established and rising scholars of feminist economics from around the globe who skilfully frame the current state and future direction of feminist economic scholarship. This carefully crafted volume will be an essential resource for researchers and instructors of feminist economics.

Essentially a Mother argues that the law of pregnancy and motherhood has been overrun by sexist ideology. Courts have held that a pregnant woman's nine months of gestation hardly count in her claim to parent the child she bears and that a man's brief moment of ejaculation matters more than a woman's labor. Armed with such dubious arguments, courts have stripped women of the right to abortion, treated surrogate mothers as mere vessels, and handed biological fathers--even those who became fathers through rape--automatic rights over women and their children. In this incisive and groundbreaking book, Jennifer Hendricks argues that feminists must overthrow the skewed value system that subordinates women, devalues caregiving, and denies too many the right to parent.

Re-Assembling Motherhood(s)' invites the reader to learn about and from Maternal Fantasies ' feminist research and collective artistic practice on mother- hood(s), care work and representation in the arts.0Composed of seven interdisciplinary artists / mothers and ten children, Maternal Fantasies takes the social invisibility of the maternal experience as a point of departure to produce films, images, and performances of fantastical visibility. Through per- sonal writing exercises and collective performance scores, they align themselves with ancestral figures of feminist discourses and artmaking, in order to establish new vocabularies and narratives around the maternal for future generations. As both a handbook and an archive of feminist artmaking, this publication (re-)assembles maternal experiences, reflective essays, autobiographical writing, instructional scores, selected artworks, and a manifesto for a caring economy.

This book studies the ways in which the assessment of being or not being ‘respectable’ has been applied to women in the UK in the past one hundred and fifty years. Mary Evans shows how the term ‘respectable’ has changed and how, most importantly, the basis of the ways in which the respectability of women has been judged has shifted from a location in women’s personal, domestic and sexual behaviour to that of how women engage in contemporary forms of citizenship, not the least of which is paid work. This shift has important social and political implications that have seldom been explored: amongst these are the growing marginalisation of the validation of the traditional care work of women, the assumption that paid work is implicitly and inevitably empowering and the complex ways in which respectability and conformity to highly sexualised conventions about female appearance have been normalised. Making Respectable Women makes use of archive material to show how the changing definition of a moral and social concept can have an impact on both the behaviour and the choices of individuals and the operations of institutional power. It will be of interest to students and scholars across the humanities and social sciences.

From its beginnings in the 1970s and 1980s, interest towards the topic of gender and migration has grown. Gender and Migration seeks to introduce the most relevant sociological theories of gender relations and migration that consider ongoing transnationalization processes, at the beginning of the third millennium. These include intersectionality, queer studies, social inequality theory and the theory of transnational migration and citizenship; all of which are brought together and illustrated by means of various empirical examples. With its explicit focus on the gendered structures of migration-sending and migration-receiving countries, Gender and Migration builds on the most current conceptual tool of gender studies—intersectionality—which calls for collective research on gender with analysis of class, ethnicity/race, sexuality, age and other axes of inequality in the context of transnational migration and mobility. The book also includes descriptions of a number of recommended films that illustrate transnational migrant masculinities and femininities within and outside of Europe. A refreshing attempt to bring in considerations of gender theory and sexual identity in the area of gender migration studies, this insightful volume will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as sociology, social anthropology, political science, intersectional studies and transnational migration.

How do migrant women living in illegality build intimate relationships? How do they experience, resist or take advantage of the tight link between intimacy and migration status created by the German migration legislation? Drawing on rich biographical accounts and ethnographic methods, the book offers an insightful and sensitive look at a mostly unknown aspect of life in illegality. Adopting a critical feminist perspective, Flaminia Bartolini shows how intimacy should be understood in its intrinsic power dimension and looks critically at the German migration regime and on its effects on migrants' lives.