Related Papers
Religion and Gender
Maternal Silences: Motherhood and Voluntary Childlessness in Contemporary Christianity
2016 •
Dawn Llewellyn
In Christianity, there is an ideology of motherhood that pervades scripture, ritual, and doctrine, yet there is an academic silence that means relatively little space has been given to motherhood and mothering, and even less to voluntary childlessness, from a faith perspective. By drawing on qualitative in-depth interviews with Christian women living in Britain, narrating their experiences of motherhood and voluntary childlessness, I suggest there are also lived maternal silences encountered by women in contemporary Christianity. There is a maternal expectation produced through church teaching, liturgy and culture that constructs women as ‘maternal bodies’ (Gatrell 2008); this silences and marginalises women from articulating their complex relationship with religion, motherhood, and childlessness in ways that challenge their spiritual development. However, this article also introduces the everyday and intentional tactics women employ to disrupt the maternal expectation, and hereby i...
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education
Performing motherhood in a disablist world: dilemmas of motherhood, femininity and disability
2009 •
Claudia Malacrida
The Turbulent Emotions of Early Parenthood (2018, book chapter) in Paths to Parenthood: Emotions on the Journey through Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Early Parenting (eds. Kokanović, Michaels, Johnston-Ataata)
Leah Williams Veazey
Expectations of the transition to parenthood often bear little resemblance to parents’ lived experiences, yet shape parents’ emotional responses. Drawing on concepts of intensive mothering, emotion work, and maternal ambivalence, this chapter explores the turbulent emotions of the transition to parenthood through an analysis of interviews with new parents in Australia. It argues that the emotion work enacted by parents in an effort to perform appropriate modes of parenting, constitutes an additional drain on exhausted parents’ emotional resources. Analysis reveals that early parenthood in Australia remains deeply gendered, and that the gap between expectation and experience results not just from an absence of prior knowledge, but from a dynamic process of knowledge-sharing, silence, denial, and refusal to know.
Dysconscious Ableism: Exploring the Psychological and emotional impact of ableism in education and motherhood
EXPLORING THE PSYCHOLOGICAL AND EMOTIONAL IMPACT OF ABLEISM IN EDUCATION AND MOTHERHOOD A TALE OF TWO PARTS
2020 •
Dr Julia N Daniels
A thesis submitted in accordance with the regulations for the award of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield I hereby declare that, except where explicit attribution is made, the work presented in this thesis is entirely my own.
The “Mother” in Attachment Theory and Attachment Informed Psychotherapy
Dianna T Kenny
Although Winnicott believed that “Freud... neglected infancy as a state” (“The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship” 587), psychoanalytic theory has always had a developmental perspective, founded on the principle that early experience, particularly within the mother-infant dyad, underlies both health development and the development of psychopathology, which is understood to be a manifestation, under conditions of stress, of problematic experiences with primary caregivers during infancy and early childhood. Freud nally a�orded a central role to the mother in the child’s development, stating that the child’s relationship with its mother was “. . .unique, without parallel, established unalterably for a whole lifetime as the rst and strongest love-object and as the prototype of all later love-relations - for both sexes” (Freud “An Outline of Psycho-Analysis” 188).
International Journal of Qualitative Studies on Health and Well-being
Social isolation and exclusion: the parents' experience of caring for children with rare neurodevelopmental disorders
2020 •
Genevieve Currie
Past & Present
The mother within: Intergenerational influences upon Australian matrescence since 1945
2020 •
Carla Pascoe Leahy
Female descendants within biological families are connected on multiple levels. While the female foetus floats in the liquid of her mother’s womb, her body silently manufactures the eggs that may one day create her own daughter. In this sense, the granddaughter is formed within the grandmother: she shares her cellular material and has inhabited the same body. In societies where children have a singular maternal figure providing care — such as industrialized countries in the twentieth and twentieth-first centuries — female generations also share an emotional matrilineal inheritance. When a woman becomes a mother for the first time, she undergoes a psychological transformation that American psychiatrist and psychoanalytic theorist Daniel Stern calls ‘the birth of the mother’.1 The emotional negotiation of new motherhood includes several layers of inter-subjective dialogue for the new mother: with herself, her child, her partner if present, her friends and her family. In the process of fashioning her own sense of herself as a mother — her maternality2 — a woman’s own infancy and childhood is emotionally revisited and re-evaluated. Sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, she is drawn into a re-evaluation of her relationship with her own mother and her mother’s parenting style. Whether willingly or reluctantly, the process of becoming a mother necessarily invokes the spectre of one’s own experience of being mothered.
The maternal is political : Exploring mothering among women with disability
2011 •
Paula Campos Pinto
In this paper disabled women’s mothering experiences in the Portuguese society are explored, drawing from in-depth interviews with 21 women with a variety of impairments, living in the metropolitan region of Lisbon. The women offer accounts of mothering which in many ways resonate with the findings reported in the mainstream literature on care, motherhood, and mothering. But disability is also a factor of difference in their lives that transforms and re-shapes their experiences and practices of mothering. Thus, both commonality and difference permeate their stories. Importantly too, women’s narratives highlight their self-determination in the face of stigmatizing discourses which historically have operated to exclude many like them from motherhood. Thus for these women, mothering is also a site of struggle and empowerment. For them the maternal is political.
Canadian Review of Sociology-revue Canadienne De Sociologie
Negotiating the Dependency/Nurturance Tightrope: Dilemmas of Motherhood and Disability
2007 •
Claudia Malacrida
La féminité normative place les mères dans une situation difficile, entre la dépendance et la tendance à se dévouer; d'un côté, les bonnes mères devraient être dépendantes dans une relation avec un mäle pourvoyeur. Inversem*nt, elles devraient fournir de bons soins par un maternage actif, habile ainsi que par leur engagement. Cette condition pose des défis aux femmes ayant une incapacité et dont la dépendance à l'égard d'un partenaire masculin peut entrainer de la vulnérabilite par rapport à l'abus, alors que de la dépendance envers l'Etat peut découler de la pauvreté et de la surveillance. L'auteure explore les dilemmes que les mères handicapées rencontrent pour concilier leur position de dépendance par rapport aux besoins de leurs enfants d'etre maternés. Compliquant les conceptions négatives de la dépendance, plusieurs femmes ont décrit comment certaines relations de dépendance leur ont apporté, a elles et à leurs enfants, des réseaux positifs de soutien.Normative femininity offers mothers a tightrope of nurturance and dependency. On the one hand, good mothers should be dependent through a relationship with a male provider. Conversely, they should provide nurturance through active, involved and expert mothering. This tightrope poses challenges to women with disabilities whose dependency on male partners can bring vulnerability to abuse, while dependency on the state can result in poverty and surveillance. This article explores the dilemmas disabled mothers face, reconciling their position of dependency against their children's need for nurturance. Complicating negative conceptions of dependency, many women described how some relations of dependency provided them and their children with positive networks of support.
A mother first, last, and always': A theological study, through life stories, of mothering a child on the autism spectrum
2020 •
Eilidh Campbell
This research seeks to offer a practical theological reflection on the experience of mothering a child on the autism spectrum. I begin by exploring contemporary literature on disability and autism to critically assess the tensions between the everyday challenges of daily mothering, and the wider impact of social attitudes and policies which occlude this experience. Adopting a feminist phenomenological approach, I then undertake an analysis of mothers' life stories. These include my own autoethnographic writing, published memoirs and life story interviews. I draw on these to construct a theological reflection on the challenges experienced by mothers of children with a diagnosis of autism and use this as a basis to critique the existing theological literature in this field. Finally, I propose that the lived experience of the mothers necessitates a theological response which attends to the complexity and unsettled nature of lived experiences which resist incorporation into normativ...
