Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (JMI - York University)
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1824 research outputs found
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Surviving the COVID-19 Pandemic with a Wolf Pack and the Marco Polo App
Full text linkThis narrative nonfiction essay explores the ways in which a group of academic mothers used Marco Polo, a video instant messaging app, to remain tethered to each other and to their work during the COVID-19 pandemic. The mothers, who are a combination of millennial and Gen Xers with children aged two to twenty-three, hail from a range of academic disciplines (e.g., theatre, education, environmental science, community health, counseling, psychology, and hospitality administration). We were all well into our careers and accustomed to grappling with the myriad ways in which the things we were raised to believe—that we could do anything we put our minds to and could definitely be mothers and career women—sometimes still felt like a pipe dream. And then COVID-19 came barreling into our lives, laying waste to all the usual coping and time management strategies upon which we typically rely. Since mid-March, we have exchanged an average of between fifty and seventy-five Marco Polo messages per day and have covered a wide range of topics—from spice storage methods, to preferred Cheeto shapes, to teaching our children to do long division while attending Zoom meetings, and to watching our male colleagues soar in terms of research productivity while we struggle to find five minutes of uninterrupted time to respond to an email. The essay offers some speculative ideas as to the role Marco Polo played in a larger story about connections between adult women during challenging times
Mothering, Resistance and Survival in Kathleen Mary Fallon’s Paydirt and Melissa Lucashenko’s Mullumbimby
Full text linkThe systematic removal of Indigenous Australian children was officially exposed over two decades ago, and the Australian Federal Government made an official apology for the practice in 2008, yet the removal rate of Indigenous Australian children by authorities remains disproportionately high. Child removal, inequalities in health, educational, and financial outcomes, and the pervasive ongoing cultural and systematic hostility against First Nations Australians, combine to create a hostile external culture for Indigenous children to grow up in. This article examines how the struggle to raise Indigenous Australian children within this hostile external context manifests in contemporary Australian literature, with respect to two texts: Paydirt (2007) by Kathleen Mary Fallon and Mullumbimby (2013) by Melissa Lucashenko. Both novels have partially autobiographical elements and feature women mothering teenage Indigenous Australian children. In each novel, the threat of child removal is used as a framing device, and reconnection to traditional Indigenous Australian culture forms both a remedy and an essential component of the survival of the children concerned. This article provides a close reading of the themes and narratives of these novels in relation to the Australian political and cultural context in order to examine how it is that the texts’ authors integrate their characters’ maternal practice with their essential resistance to hostile external forces and cultures
Matricentric Policy Research: Making Room for Mothers in an Inclusive Research Partnership
Full text linkIn this article, I argue inclusive policy research using "big data" that is informed by matricentric feminist values can yield analysis and recommendations that will be empowering for mothers. Drawing on my experience as a feminist legal scholar and my developing interest in social policy as a means to achieve justice for mothers and other carers, I contend that legal challenges to advance equality for mothers have not been as successful as early assessments might have predicted. Instead, I explore how an inclusive team approach to the kind of social problems that make life difficult for many mothers in Canada could yield better policy that brings them closer to equality. I describe a policy research partnership that includes public servants and community groups as well as academics, informed by an intersectional approach. The partnership will make use of administrative data in Manitoba to explore social policy challenges, including affected community members and public servants from all relevant departments from the outset, ensuring that the questions that are explored reflect the real needs of the people the policies are intended to serve. With two examples of previous research, I illustrate how mother-focused recommendations can flow from the kind of big data available in Manitoba
One Is Not Born But Rather Becomes a Mother: Claiming the Maternal in Women and Gender Studies
Full text linkIn their dominant, institutionalized iterations within the field of women and gender studies, as well as in much feminist theory, the concepts of female empowerment, self-direction, and gender equality are still largely based on Western neoliberal views of individualism, self, and agency. Notwithstanding important theoretical interventions from the field of motherhood studies and a recent strand of feminist theory and philosophy promoting a relational understanding of identity, self and agency, full equality in mainstream feminism still “requires that women be liberated from the consequences of their bodies, namely the ability to bear children” (Fox-Genovese 21). The aim of this article is to contribute to work seeking to deconstruct forms of essentialism embedded in women and gender studies and feminist theory by bringing together feminist critiques of Western conceptions of self and identity and the theory of the maternal articulated in motherhood studies. My hope is to make apparent the distance between the body in its reproductive function (pregnancy and birth) on the one hand, and the performativity embedded in the maternal role, on the other. By discussing maternal work as separate from pregnancy and birth, I wish to highlight the socially constructed nature of expectations and ideas associated with maternity and reveal that the often neglected agency involved in taking on and performing the role of mother
Centring Complex Maternal Emotion in The Babadook
Full text linkJennifer Kent’s horror film The Babadook shines a spotlight on maternal ambivalence, which is easily read as horrifying in a culture that demands mothers feel or express nothing but love for their children. However, Kent asks her audience to look beyond maternal ambivalence as a representation of bad, mad, or monstrous mothering and instead as an act of resistance to one of the most intimate forms of female oppression—motherhood. Read this way, The Babadook challenges what Adrienne Rich named the "institution of motherhood." I argue that The Babadook moves beyond the institution of motherhood and into the realm of the emotional and psychological ramifications the institution engenders. I engage Barbara Almond’s The Monster Within: The Hidden Side of Motherhood to help convey the experiences of what she refers to as "the dark side of motherhood." It is in this dark space that Amelia, the film’s protagonist, finds herself. Like so many mothers, Amelia has no outlet to honestly express what and how she feels about motherhood and about her child. As a result, she denies and represses her feelings. But monsters are not often born from the expression of feelings but from their repression, and the more her feelings are denied the stronger the monster—the Babadook—grows. Ultimately, The Babadook challenges the many cultural and emotional restrictions placed upon mothers. More so, it asks those of us who are mothers to consider loving and maybe even nurturing the monster within
A Motherly Society: Scandinavian Feminism and a Culture of Sexual Equality in the Works of Ellen Key, Elin Wägner, and Alva Myrdal
Full text linkAs a key polemic figure in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Ellen Key (1849-1926) established the concept of "collective motherliness" ("samhällsmoderlighet") and extended the meaning of motherhood from a biological category defined by the birthing of a child to a female societal force, thus bringing forth (or giving birth to) a new and better society.1 A few decades later, Swedish author and activist Elin Wägner (1882-1949) developed a theory of matriarchy in her pivotal work Alarm Clock (1941), and that same year, Swedish sociologist and politician Alva Myrdal (1902-1986) proposed government policies that would promote the welfare of mothers and their children in her book Nation and Family: The Swedish Experiment in Democratic Family and Population Policy (1941). These three Swedish feminists—Ellen Key, Elin Wägner, and Alva Myrdal— influenced the cultural landscape of Sweden in the late-nineteenth and early-tomid- twentieth century, and helped create a foundation for the Swedish welfare state. My aim is to show how their works contributed to the Scandinavian culture of sexual equality and respect for motherhood (and by extension parenthood). I also aim to elucidate the lasting relevance of their work. This article is part of my ongoing book project on Scandinavian feminism. It is, therefore, open to constant revision, rethinking, and rediscovery of the impact of Key, Wägner, and Myrdal
A Matricentric Feminist’s Approach to Art Activism: Killjoy Tactics in Rape Stories from the Family Album
Full text linkI am a matricentric feminist as described by Andrea O’Reilly in her text Matricentric Feminism: Theory, Activism, and Practice. Matricentric feminists are evolving in response to new feminist understandings and motherhood theories; they do not pre-exist. I am a feminist killjoy as prescribed by Sara Ahmed in "A Killjoy Manifesto." Feminist killjoys are assigned to pre-existing conditions, often because they are assembled around circumstance. I also produce comics and sequential art in a reflexive praxis that has value in the disciplinary sense rather than aiming at market value. In this article, I discuss six drawings from my book Rape Stories from the Family Album. I consider them through a matricentric feminist lens highlighting how they reflect an activist art praxis that mobilizes feminist killjoy tactics. I will focus my discussion around my traumatic memories of learning about my three daughters’ rapes as represented in the drawings. Where necessary for sense making I will introduce aspects of comics art and trauma memoir
