Remembering Maternal Bodies

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.

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.

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).

The maternal body is a site of contested dynamics of power, identity, experience, autonomy, occupation, and control. Representations of the maternal body can mis/represent the childbearing and mothering form variously, often as monstrous, idealized, limited, scrutinized, or occupied, whilst dominant discourses limit motherhood through social devaluation. The maternal body has long been a hypervisible artifact: at once bracketed out in the interest of elevating the contributions of sperm-carriers or fetal status; and regarded with hostility and suspicion as out of control. Such arguments are deployed to justify surveillance mechanisms, medical scrutiny, and expectation of self-discipline.This volume helps to develop a more critical understanding of what it means to be an embodied mother. The materiality of maternity and its centrality to family and social life remains too often viewed as a ?fringe? subject, the province of feminists, activists, hysterical women. For too long, the maternal body has been subject to ?expert? advice, guidance, censure, and control. Those of us maternal bodies are at risk of being commodified and diminished, having our bodily realities reduced to mechanistic functions and our lived experience disregarded. From art to medical surveillance, from genetics to radioactivity, goddess to breastfeeding, poetry to Indigenous community, dance to body size, the critical eye of the academic and the lived experience of the mother bring into being in this work a body of understanding, of expression, of knowledge and the power and authority of the lived experience, through and about the embodied mother. This critical-creative work encompasses new insights, new research, and redeveloped perspectives which combine the personal with the pervasive and point to new meaning-making in critical motherhood studies via the medium of the maternal body.

"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.

The pathbreaking investigation into motherhood and womanhood from an influential and enduring feminist voice, now for a new generation. In Of Woman Born, originally published in 1976, influential poet and feminist Adrienne Rich examines the patriarchic systems and political institutions that define motherhood. Exploring her own experience—as a woman, a poet, a feminist, and a mother—she finds the act of mothering to be both determined by and distinct from the institution of motherhood as it is imposed on all women everywhere. A “powerful blend of research, theory, and self-reflection” (Sandra M. Gilbert, Paris Review), Of Woman Born revolutionized how women thought about motherhood and their own liberation. With a stirring new foreword from National Book Critics Circle Award–winning writer Eula Biss, the book resounds with as much wisdom and insight today as when it was first written.