The Maternal Tug

While the existence of maternal ambivalence has been evident for centuries, it has only recently been recognized as central to the lived experience of mothering. This accessible, yet intellectually rigorous, interdisciplinary collection demonstrates its presence and meaning in relation to numerous topics such as pregnancy, birth, Caesarean sections, sleep, self-estrangement, helicopter parenting, poverty, environmental degradation, depression, anxiety, queer mothering, disability, neglect, filicide and war rape. Its authors deny the assumption that mothers who experience ambivalence are bad, evil, unnatural, or insane. Moreover, historical records and cross-cultural narratives indicate that maternal ambivalence appears in a wide range of circumstances; but that it becomes unmanageable in circumstances of inequity, deprivation and violence. From this premise, the authors in this collection raise imperative ethical, social, and political questions, suggesting possibilities for vital cultural transformations. These candid explorations demand we rethink our basic assumptions about how mothering is experienced in everyday life.

While the existence of maternal ambivalence has been evident for centuries, it has only recently been recognized as central to the lived experience of mothering. This accessible, yet intellectually rigorous, interdisciplinary collection demonstrates its presence and meaning in relation to numerous topics such as pregnancy, birth, Caesarean sections, sleep, self-estrangement, helicopter parenting, poverty, environmental degradation, depression, anxiety, queer mothering, disability, neglect, filicide and war rape. Its authors deny the assumption that mothers who experience ambivalence are bad, evil, unnatural, or insane. Moreover, historical records and cross-cultural narratives indicate that maternal ambivalence appears in a wide range of circumstances; but that it becomes unmanageable in circumstances of inequity, deprivation and violence. From this premise, the authors in this collection raise imperative ethical, social, and political questions, suggesting possibilities for vital cultural transformations. These candid explorations demand we rethink our basic assumptions about how mothering is experienced in everyday life.

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.

We think of medical science and doctors as focused on treating conditions—whether it’s a cough or an aching back. But the sicknesses and complaints that cause us to seek medical attention actually have deeper origins than the superficial germs and behaviors we regularly fault. In fact, as Jeremy Taylor shows in Body by Darwin, we can trace the roots of many medical conditions through our evolutionary history, revealing what has made us susceptible to certain illnesses and ailments over time and how we can use that knowledge to help us treat or prevent problems in the future. In Body by Darwin, Taylor examines the evolutionary origins of some of our most common and serious health issues. To begin, he looks at the hygiene hypothesis, which argues that our obsession with anti-bacterial cleanliness, particularly at a young age, may be making us more vulnerable to autoimmune and allergic diseases. He also discusses diseases of the eye, the medical consequences of bipedalism as they relate to all those aches and pains in our backs and knees, the rise of Alzheimer’s disease, and how cancers become so malignant that they kill us despite the toxic chemotherapy we throw at them. Taylor explains why it helps to think about heart disease in relation to the demands of an ever-growing, dense, muscular pump that requires increasing amounts of nutrients, and he discusses how walking upright and giving birth to ever larger babies led to a problematic compromise in the design of the female spine and pelvis. Throughout, he not only explores the impact of evolution on human form and function, but he integrates science with stories from actual patients and doctors, closely examining the implications for our health. As Taylor shows, evolutionary medicine allows us think about the human body and its adaptations in a completely new and productive way. By exploring how our body’s performance is shaped by its past, Body by Darwin draws powerful connections between our ancient human history and the future of potential medical advances that can harness this knowledge.

This book constitutes a feminist literary analysis of motherhood as presented in selected Indian women’s fictions across a diverse range of geographical, linguistic, class and caste contexts. Situated at the crossroads of motherhood studies and literary studies, this book offers a rigorous examination of the prosody and politics of motherhood in this corpus. In its five thematically focused chapters, the book scrutinises in depth such key concerns as maternal ambivalence; maternal agency and caste; mother–daughter relationships; motherhood and diaspora; and non-biological motherhood. It attempts to understand the literary ramifications of these issues in order to identify the ways in which fiction writers reconceive of the notion of motherhood and maternal identities from and against multiple perspectives. Another pressing concern is whether these Indian women writers’ visions furnish readers with any different understandings of motherhood as compared to dominant Western feminist discourses. Maternal Fictions advances feminist literary criticism in the specific area of Indian women’s writing and the overarching areas of motherhood and literature by acting as a launchpad into a complex constellation of ideas concerning motherhood. The fictional universe is at once ambivalent, diverse, contingent, grounded in a specific location, and yet well placed to converse with discourses emanating from other times and places.

Weaving personal narrative with a synthesis of feminist mothering theory and psychoanalytic theories of narcissism, Isaac D. Balbus describes his effort to share in the care of his daughter during her first four years.

Featuring close readings of selected poetry, visual texts, short stories and novels published for children since 1945 from Naughty Amelia Jane to Watership Down, this is the first extensive study of the nature and form of ethical discourse in British children's literature. Ethics in British Children's Literature explores the extent to which contemporary writing for children might be considered philosophical, tackling ethical spheres relevant to and arising from books for young people, such as naughtiness, good and evil, family life, and environmental ethics. Rigorously engaging with influential moral philosophers, from Aristotle through Kant and Hegel, to Arno Leopold, Iris Murdoch, Mary Midgley, and Lars Svendsen, this book demonstrates the narrative strategies employed to engage young readers as moral agents.

This book brings together phenomenological studies of the experience of forgiveness. The contributors, from psychological, philosophical, and theological backgrounds, set aside theoretical presuppositions, approach this topic with fresh eyes, and address problematic aspects of the existing literature.