Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (JMI - York University)
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Amneh: My Grandmother and My Feminist Inspiration
Get PDFI dedicate this article to the memory of my grandmother, Amneh ‘Awad Taha-Hamed. Throughout the history of the Palestinian people, women have been involved with wars and upheavals, personal losses, and exile, as well as with social, educational, and economic changes. The Nakba’s (Palestinian catastrophe of 1948) memories and stories are combined with fear, loss, violence, humiliation, and insecure feelings. Palestinian mothers and grandmothers, citizens of Israel play an active role in keeping the Palestinian identity and the traditional structures alive by passing their memories to the next generations. As a result of the Nakba, and the confiscation of lands, women started to stay at home and take on domestic roles to preserve Palestinian cultural and religious values. This was my experience with my grandmother, Amneh, who had many personal and diverse experiences within the context of the social and political changes that took place in her life, especially when my grandfather was detained. During that time, she remained with her four children and gave birth to her fifth child without the presence of my grandfather who was in Israeli prison. Amneh putit upon herself to pass her memories and reflections to her grandchildren, to keep her story, and her people’s history and narrative alive
“Most Often People Would Tell Me I Was Crazy”: Defending against Deviance Ascribed to Alternative Birth Choices
Get PDFChildbirth-related discourses and practices have fluctuated over time in Canada. A medicalized model currently dominates, but there is increasing plurality in how birth is conceptualized and enacted. From a sample of twenty-one first-time mothers who were interviewed about their childbirth-related experiences, we explored how women described and defended their alternative birth choices within the broader social context of medicalized birth. Data were thematically analyzed and explored in relation to theoretical work on stigma and deviance, since these concepts emerged as salient to women’s narrated experiences. Findings illustrate that mothers who make alternative childbirth choices are often marked as deviant and may elicit moralizing judgments from others, which largely stem from perceptions of risk and/or safety. To counter or avoid feared and experienced deviance, women managed information about the birth of their child through passing, covering, normalizing through reframing, and condemning the condemners. This information management allowed women to present themselves as responsible, competent mothers in the face of deviance. Although previous research has demonstrated birth-related stigma in relation to the choice to birth at home or unassisted, our findings suggest that ascriptions of deviance may also extend to women’s choice of midwifery and doula care despite their increasing prevalence as part of maternity care in Canada. Since these birth options are progressively available and used, and have some empirically documented benefits for mothers, further exploration of how they and other alternative childbirth options are perceived, experienced, and morally valued by women and the general public is warranted
Cyber Labour: Birth Stories on Mommyblogs as Narrative Gateways into Maternal Thinking
Get PDFThis article deals with birth stories on mommyblogs as a narrative genre through which writers become participators in maternal thinking and practices. Grounded in the feminist new materialism, feminist literary studies and social media studies, this article investigates the positions of writing and reading birth stories as well as their effects and connectedness to discourses on mothering, difference, agency and digital subjectivity. Through examples from birth-story posts this article shows how birth stories construct mothering both online and offline. As I sketch out birth stories as gateways into mommyblogging and reading, I weave in an autoethnographical narrative of encountering birth stories while I was pregnant. In my close reading of birth story examples from mommyblogs, I focus on the concepts of relationality, the cyborg, as well as maternal agency, thinking and practice. I analyze norms, narration of difference, and the reflexive relationality these maternal narratives create. What I discover is a digital (m)other: a shifting maternal subjectivity of a cyber mother, who appears liminally in both digital and material condensations
Motherhood Studies and Feminist Theory: Elisions and Intersections
Get PDFThe study of motherhood has had an uneasy and ambivalent relationship to feminism and feminist theory. Ranging from radical feminist rejection of motherhood on the perceived basis of its inherent oppression of women, and the view that “motherhood has everything to do with a history in which women remain powerless by reproducing the world of men” (Allen 316), to more moderate accounts of that ambivalence that caution against the “recent positive feminist focus on motherhood” that romanticizes motherhood by drawing heavily on sexist stereotypes (hooks 135), feminist thought continues to traverse with difficulty the complex terrain linking motherhood and maternal activity to feminist concerns. In this paper, I argue that there are complex intersections between feminist theory and motherhood studies that become particularly evident when motherhood is considered within a “third wave” context. By highlighting the development of motherhood studies within the context of third-wave feminism and its consistency with broad feminist ideals of female empowerment and social justice, I advocate for the systematic inclusion of the study of motherhood as a central aspect of women’s experience into established feminist, women, and gender studies agendas
