Mapping Maternal Subjectivities, Identities and Ethics

This book chapter argues that argues that Cusk’s novel 'Outline' (2014) is a work of matricentric feminism, urging us to remember our Mother-Line.  Cusk’s narrator Faye is depicted as a feminist mother in a state of “dereliction” (Luce Irigaray’s term for feminine homelessness under patriarchy), who is propelled on a time travel to the “matricidal” beginnings of literature and philosophy. On her journey, Faye discovers how the past lingers on in our present.  Through investigating the link between maternity and temporality, Outline criticizes the lack of attention to the mother in contemporary feminism, and pushes Faye into “digging up her liquid ground” (Irigaray), in a bid to elbow out some space for an embodied maternal subjectivity that is nevertheless de-essentialized.

There are around 2.2 billion mothers ("Statistics"), and over 77 million live in the United States (US) (United States Census Bureau). Unfortunately, feminists have self-admittedly done a poor job representing the interests of mothers. Shari L. Thurer, for example, asserts that as soon as a woman becomes a mother, "her personal desires either evaporate or metamorphose so that they are identical with those of her infant"
(191). In short, she "ceases to exist" (Thurer 191). Moreover, even though women's unpaid domestic work in the US raises the gross domestic product by 25.7 per cent (McCann), economists often overlook the work of full-time mothers. This article situates mothers within feminist theory and discourse by demonstrating that mothers are not fully represented by feminists or economists and as such are marginalized by both identities. In short, motherhood is an experience that is not adequately addressed by the experiences of women or workers. An intersectional approach will help ensure mothers get the attention they deserve as a social identity in intersectional feminist scholarship.

Black feminist scholarship has long identified the family as an ambiguous space: at once constituted through gendered, age-specific and other power relations, and also a source of support against racist experiences in wider society (Carby, 1982). Mothers, in particular, are charged with caring for children. This often includes transmitting cultural resources that enable children to develop positive cultural identities as an important resource to help them cope with racism (Hill Collins, 1990; Reynolds, 2005). This care and cultural work is not only limited to biological mother-child relationships; women might engage in other-mothering, or bring their care and culture work to their community activism (Reynolds, 2003; Erel and Tomlinson, 2005) (Figures 1-3). 1 See http://www .open.ac.uk/ ccig/events/ migrantmotherscaring-for-thefuture for more information.

This manuscript explores the unique construction of community that young, low-income, women create, based on the embodied internal and external spaces they occupy as lone mothers. Issues related to diverse women's representation, voice, and power, within these socially constructed communities are examined. Attention is paid to how young low-income mothers experience and actively create their own supportive community within both geographic and social boundaries, in active resistance to dominant and oppressive assumptions. To explore these concepts in-depth, results are presented from an ethnographic study that examined the community participation of eleven young, low-income, racially diverse single mothers living in a small U.S. Midwestern city. Findings focus on the multiple ways that women's lives embodied the idea of community through the prism of motherhood, race, class, and geographic/ physical space. The use of qualitative participatory mapping techniques is also emphasized to examine these physically and socially constructed boundaries. Implications are discussed for ways that social workers can best advocate for social justice by using an intersectional lens to locate and partner with the organic communities of mothering that these women created.

Sophia Brock 30 "Revolving Maternal Identities". Review of
Petra Bueskens. Modern Motherhood and Women's Dual Identities: Rewriting the Sexual Contract
Australian Women's Book Review, Volume 28.1 (2018)

Australian Women's Book Review

Editor: Carole Ferrier
ISSN: 1033 9434

Men didn't do anything.. .. The mother did for the child. The father went out to work.. .. I was a very determined, modern woman, but I didn't mind being the little wife.-Marjorie, 1950s mother 1 1. All interviewees are referred to by pseudonyms. Where permission is granted by the interviewee, interview material is preserved at Museums Victoria in Melbourne, Australia.

This brief offers context, challenges, and sustainable practices on a cross cutting issue of integration based on the SPRING review report: Evidence on Integration Policy Practices. This extensive review of integration literature revealed that when integrating into the host society, newly arrived migrants face numerous challenges based on their gender and parental status.

An invited entry contribution to CLINKS growing evidence library covering key issues in criminal justice in the UK.This evidence review provides an in-depth look at the issue of maternal imprisonment and the impact of this imprisonment on the children affected, the mothers themselves and the family members (typically grandmothers) who take over childcare responsibilities. It covers a number of key issues: The extent of maternal imprisonment in the UK and the numbers of children affected The impact on children The impact on mothers, both in prison and on release The impact on family carers and family relationships The response of the criminal justice system Recommendations for change

This paper aims to discuss the influence of religion on the reconfiguration of work-family relations promoted by three groups of migrant women to deal with the Portuguese economic crisis and labour market contraction whose effects have been more marked than in many other E.U. countries. Comparative ethnographic research has brought to light how female religious participation generates social capitals and converts them in material and work-family reconciliation resources thus mitigating vulnerabilities or triggering beneficial results that affect the lives of families in both the short and long term. Despite the differences in mobilizing religious resources to manage work and family life within the three groups, the achievement of such a ‘balance’ depends on a similar religious construction of female self which is developed against an individualized notion of personhood. Keywords : work-family balance, religious participation, gender dynamics, social capitals, Portugal

This study is part of a larger set of studies about maternal suffering, understood as socially determined. Its objective is to investigate the collective imaginary of women who experienced pregnancy loss, from the perspective of psychoanalytic concrete psychology. The importance of this study lies in its potential to shed light upon a situation that is relevant for psychological practice in the scope of motherhood, contributing to support preventive measures and interventions. This qualitative study adopted the psychoanalytical method to address Brazilian blogs authored by women reporting pregnancy loss. Two fields of affective-emotional meaning emerged from the psychoanalytical interpretation: “It’s the mother’s fault” and “Eternal void”. Both fields convey the idea that women are the only ones accountable for gestational loss, leading to feelings of guilt and emptiness.

A recent memorandum received in my workplace, an Australian academic department, was headed 'Presence of Young Children in University Buildings during Working Hours'. Its content and tone were disturbing to a number of staff members (though certainly not to all). In its 'Health and Safety' bureaucratese, it expressed concern for the welfare of young children, some of whom had been 'come across ... riding alone in the lifts, playing on the stairwells or running in and out of the buildings'. Concern over the disruption to staff members and to the University legally, was expressed in a deeply condescending and repressive note of instruction. It was addressed to parents (via their heads of department), on the conduct of their parenting: 'school holidays, public holidays and curriculum days are all known well in advance and appropriate arrangements for the care of children can be made for such periods... Unsupervised activities . .leave children exposed to acc...

This paper aims to discuss the influence of religion on the reconfiguration of workfamily relations promoted by three groups of migrant women to deal with the Portuguese economic crisis and labour market contraction whose effects have been more marked than in many other E.U. countries. Comparative ethnographic research has brought to light how female religious participation generates social capitals and converts them in material and work-family reconciliation resources thus mitigating vulnerabilities or triggering beneficial results that affect the lives of families in both the short and long term. Despite the differences in mobilizing religious resources to manage work and family life within the three groups, the achievement of such a 'balance' depends on a similar religious construction of female self which is developed against an individualized notion of personhood.

Feminist research seeks to authenticate, substantiate and illuminate women's thoughts, feelings and experiences (Oakley, 2016; Renzetti, 2013; Maynard and Purvis, 1994). Trusting the memories, accounts and assimilated experiences of participants, and their authentic reproduction is an essential aspect to feminist research principles, whether those memories and experiences are recent or distant. This is particularly important concerning a population who are so often mistrusted, silenced, unheard or muted, i.e. prisoners, criminalised women, and children (Baldwin in Lockwood, forthcoming, Bozkurt and Aresti 2019, O'Malley 2018, Wahidin 2004). Aresti et al (2016), argue that lack of visibility and voice in academic criminological research results in prisoners and criminalised individuals often being excluded from the processes of research, furthermore, often being entirely invisible in the products of research, (i.e. research reports, theses, dissertations). Feminist researchers Oakley (1981, 2016), Finch (1984), and Maynard and Purvis (1994) highlight the importance of increased and evidenced reflexivity, alongside a minimisation of power imbalance. Which, they argue can be achieved at least in part, by not viewing research participants as simply being done to as opposed to researched with. Thus, in feminist research, reflexivity is essential, as are the presence and voices of research participants as evident in the process and products of research. This chapter explored the research dynamic between researcher and researched in feminist studies, highlighting and arguing for greater involvement of participants in research, and more creative means of generating knowledge and understanding. The chapter has a global reach in terms of its application. It will identify examples of particularly interactive and creative research and conclude with recommendations for good practice internationally.

The aim of this study was to analyze the psychodynamics of three mother-infant pairs with reflux diagnosis and two with colic diagnosis and their possible relation to the referred psychosomatic disorders. Qualitative exploratory study in which the sample was composed after signing the informed consent form. Instruments: semi-directed interview, seven boards of the Thematic Apperception Test and Naturalistic Observation. Content analysis of the interviews and TAT boards was performed and the way the mother perceived the productions of the baby was considered from naturalistic observation. These analyses supported psychodynamic interpretations of the functioning of the dyads studied. As main results, the reflux group highlights the need for maternal support and the presence of maternal ambivalence. In mother-infant pairs with colic, there is anxiety regarding their own ability to care for their child. In both groups, there is environmental influence on the way mothers feel about suffi...

The aim of this study was to analyze the psychodynamics of three mother-infant pairs with reflux diagnosis and two with colic diagnosis and their possible relation to the referred psychosomatic disorders. Qualitative exploratory study in which the sample was composed after signing the informed consent form. Instruments: semi-directed interview, seven boards of the Thematic Apperception Test and Naturalistic Observation. Content analysis of the interviews and TAT boards was performed and the way the mother perceived the productions of the baby was considered from naturalistic observation. These analyses supported psychodynamic interpretations of the functioning of the dyads studied. As main results, the reflux group highlights the need for maternal support and the presence of maternal ambivalence. In mother-infant pairs with colic, there is anxiety regarding their own ability to care for their child. In both groups, there is environmental influence on the way mothers feel about suffi...

By setting up a dialogue with the`adult' unconscious of his patients, Freud had to admit, not without scandal for those times, that he was inevitably led into the dark area of childhood sexuality. That the child is the father of the man, as E Armstrong-Perlman reminded us in her introduction to this series of articles on infant development, is a truth which only became so in our culture, more precisely, from the time that psychoanalysis discovered the importance of childhood for the unconscious of adult patients. Thanks to this discovery the child has become the centre of interest in most branches of our culture and understanding in a way as never before in history, as the historian Philippe Aries suggests in his interesting book on the history of the family in the Ancien Regime. ' Childhood seems to contain in itself the mystery of our origin. It is the foundation for any further development. That the quest for the mystery of origins holds strong in psychoanalysis can be seen in the way it traces man's relation to the world further and further back, into the mists of an original state, as if to catch it in the act, at its birth. Like storytellers , psychoanalysts too would like to start the story with a 'Once upon a time'. Like the cell in biology and the atom in physics, psychoanalysis too looks for the irreducible unit of the psychic world. Object relation theory, in spite of all its variations of emphases, postulates the irreducible relation to a primary object (namely, the breast) which will determine to a greater or lesser extent the internal world of the infant and thus, eventually, the adult. As for the nature of this object there are different emphases according to different schools, whether it is an external or an internal object or in which way phantasy and external reality interact in the constitution of the psychic object. Generally the advocates of this original unit, which is specifically the mother-child one, reproach Freud for not having gone further with the reconstruction of childhood in analysis, implying that if he had done so he would inevitably have realised the importance of earlier and earlier stages of development. But such a reproach does not take into account that the one they reproach for such a lacuna is the very discoverer of psychic infantile development, and his developmental pre-oedipal stages and their fundamental importance in our sexual choice are still the unchallenged milestones on which all later work on infancy is based. It has an air of denial, or else of naivety, to believe that it was by accident that Freud The author is a psychoanalyst practising in London and a founder member of`The Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research', affiliated to the Lacan international network 'Le Champs I Freudien' .

What normative force might bind together an ethically attuned biosocial sphere that we as humans co-inhabit with other animal species?
To explore this question, this essay takes its cues from well-established research on the responsive, preverbal connection of the human infant and adult caregiver (Bateson 1979; Trevarthen 1984; Stern 1985, 2010; Gibbs 2001, 2010; Hansen 2004; Anderson 2006; Papoulias and Callard 2010; Willett 1995, 2001). To this research we can add new animal studies (Smuts 1999, 2001; Fudge 2002; de Waal 2006, 2009; Bekoff 2007; Molnar 2008; Haraway 2008). These animal studies provide a basis for extending an “ethics of eros” with roots in Luce Irigaray, Michel Foucault, Enrique Dussel, Africana feminism, Freudo-Marxist critical theory, and Plato but reconfigured in terms of social bonds across multiple animal species. In this tradition of ethics, the lack of a cognitive-based moral subjectivity that can translate into human terms does not consign nonhuman species to a mute moral status. On the contrary, some more primordial basis for relationship and meaning may weave thin but substantial threads of a postmoral ethics across regions of the biosphere.
Given the diverse modes of subjectivity among animal species, and even the lack of what we call a moral subject altogether in many species, neither ordinary modes of empathy nor of moral understanding go very far in forging multispecies social bonds. For this reason, we turn to research on “the attunement of affects”.

This paper engages with what it means to write love and poses the question: what does love do for feminine writing? I move beyond the concept of love as an ideology or condition of work (such as 'for the love of the job') and draw on a feminine poetics of organisation that highlights its disruptive potential. Love, in this sense, breaks the rationality and order of the 'masterful' text and alters gendered academic writing. The power of writing with love and effecting change in organisations is developed through a discussion of three feminist writers. The paper explores three significant texts:

This book, taking Euripides´s Medea as its starting point, is addressed to people who are interested in womanhood, its fortunes and misfortunes, creativity and destructivity. When Jason rejected her wife Medea, she killed their two children as a revenge.

T. Brouckaert), Chia.longman@ugent.be (C. Longman). 1 As Andrea O'Reilly (2004: 2) explains, inspired by the writings of Adrienne Rich (1976): 'The term "motherhood" refers to the patriarchal institution of motherhood that is maledefined and controlled and is deeply oppressive to women, while the word "mothering" refers to women's experiences of mothering that are female-defined and centered and potentially empowering to women.' Women's Studies International Forum 67 (2018) 65-71 0277-5395/

Prison is a challenging place for most women but this emotional space is magnified when it is a mother who is incarcerated. The maternal experience for mothers in prison is often at best disrupted, at worst destroyed, by the location. This paper considers how maternal emotions and the maternal role are assembled and challenged through carceral space, and more specifically, how mothers themselves assimilate this experience whilst navigating motherhood post incarceration. The data presented is based on twenty recorded in-depth individual interviews with released mothers across England and Wales. The research findings highlight the significant emotional harm and turmoil felt by mothers themselves and on mother-child relationships, experienced during incarceration and long after their release. Furthermore , the findings emphasise the significance and value of compassionate and thoughtful management of carceral space in relation to mothering emotions. The paper concludes with reflections on the findings of the study and recommendations for future research and practice.

This is a forward to Andrea O'Reilly's new book Matricentric Feminism: Theory, Activism, Practice (Demeter Press, 2016)

"Mothers are, O’Reilly contends, the unfinished business of feminism.
Perhaps this is why there is still such ambivalence around the
topic and why motherhood is so often conflated with “essentialism”
and dismissed as the realm of the privileged. Sadly, as O’Reilly
shows, such charges often come from within academic feminism
itself. Could anything be further from the truth? Motherhood is
itself an index of oppression as we can see in the career profiles and
interrupted work histories, income, leisure (or lack thereof), and
domestic inequality of mothers. Indeed, it is on this basis that a
matricentric feminism is needed!"

This paper traces and develops Laplanche's return to Freud's unfinished theory of sublimation and his relocation of it within his General Theory of Primal Seduction and his translation model of of the processes of psychic formation. It does so by a close reading of Freud's great 'translation' letter to Fliess (6th December, 1896) which contains the seeds of the concept of sublimation. It then reads Laplanche's late essay "Sublimation / Inspiration" with its elaboration of Freud's proposal in the Leonardo study of a primal sublimation 'from the beginning' and a generalisation of it as a central process in the formation of the psychical apparatus. it concludes by considering in relation to sublimation as a form of 'translation' Freud's revised analysis of Leonardo's masterpiece, The Virgin and Child with St Anne (Louvre) in the light of the earlier London Cartoon (National Gallery) .

This essay has had a response from Beth Spencer When a mother breastfeeds in those intense first months, she is sometimes referred to endearingly as a "Milkbrain", with that slightly zoned-out affect, and a tendency to lose things on the bus. The biochemical cause is thought to be the hormone oxytocin, known as the cuddle hormone. The body produces oxytocin when we breastfeed, when we have sex and when we give birth. Men also produce more oxytocin following orgasm and on the birth of their children.

For an artist there are several points of departure that can contribute to one's artistic expression. Here with reference to a particular work of mine entitled Mysterious Symphony, I would like to narrate an incident. It brings forth how the subconscious mind can be an active agent in the creative process. Also how this relationship between the subconscious mind and art can shape the visual representation of the context; as it did, of 'the maternal' in my work series titled Transit Spaces.

This study reveals the lack of attention paid to the significance of breastfeeding in traditional psychoanalysis whereby the mother is continually aligned as object and her breast is disembodied. This phenomenon is explained through insights in psychoanalytic feminism which bring attention to the matricidal thread running through conceptions of subjectivity. The ramifications of this on women’s symbolic identities is considered through themes such as abjection, lack of individuation between woman and mother and the denial of female embodied specificity. The aim of the study is to resituate the mother as desiring social subject and to acknowledge the importance of the erotically charged breast in psychic life. I draw on Laplanche’s acknowledgement of maternal sexuality in psychic life and keep his work in tension with that of Luce Irigaray in exposing the unconscious fantasies informing the symbolic. The analysis focuses on Catherine Opie’s depiction of breastfeeding in Self-Portrait / Nursing and suggests that this image makes an important contribution to articulating the mother as desiring social subject specifically in relation to the embodied practice of breastfeeding.

Hannah Rosin’s contribution to the April 2009 issue of The Atlantic entitled ‘The Case Against Breast-feeding’, created national outrage by questioning the medical literature on infant feeding upon which the mantra ‘breast is best’ is based. This article uses Rosin’s ambivalence regarding breast-feeding as a way to understand why breast-feeding is a culturally and psychically fraught practice. It explores the rhetoric of breast-feeding advocacy in two contexts: (i) the US government’s 2004 National Breastfeeding Awareness Campaign and (ii) La Leche League International. I argue that the government campaign deploys a politics characteristic of Jacques Lacan’s concept of the Symbolic Order. The approach used by La Leche, by contrast, constitutes a politics based on the logic of what Lacan calls the Imaginary realm. I will argue that breast-feeding promotion requires a politics derived from the logic of what Lacan calls the Real – an approach to which Rosin’s piece unexpectedly points us.

Despite a significant number of representations and facts about witches it is not easy to imagine a witch. Is it gendered? A hunchbacked, repugnant creature flying on a broomstick? Or, a wise, noble crone stirring a cauldron? Maybe a seductive fertility goddess dancing at the edge of a forest? Somehow it has become female; engulfing, castrating, possessive and then trapped, alienated. Portrayed as an archetypal figure of evil, a harlot, or a hysteric, the Western witch-figure recedes back into the realm of myths and superstitions; a timeless era of human (pre)consciousness creating binary coherences, cultural patterns and rationalities.

This paper provides an alternative mapping of (home) birthing bodysubjects. It argues that an individualist (and phallocentric) model of the subject permeates cross-disciplinary childbirth research, resulting in a limited and 'disciplined' representation of birthing subjectivity. Using the theory of the 'subject-in-process' outlined by Julia Kristeva, together with poetic methodological devices drawn from the voice-centred relational method of Carol Gilligan and colleagues, this paper attempts to represent birthing subjectivity in alternative ways. It shows how (home) birthing subjectivities emerged as contradictory movements as they performatively 'told' childbirth, positioned paradoxically in relation to three key narratives, namely: clockwork birth, lived birth and undecidable birth. The paper argues that a Kristevan theory of the subject allows a rethinking of the birthing body-subject, showing how these subjectivities are produced (in talk) as unstable, ambiguous movements, constantly interrupted and disrupted by the play of ideological voices, cultural scripts, bodily energies and socio-linguistic constraints.