Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (JMI - York University)
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Mothering in the Aftermath of Forced Marriage and Wartime Rape: The Complexities of Motherhood in Postwar Northern Uganda
Get PDFDuring northern Uganda’s civil war (1986-2007), the abduction, forced marriage, and impregnation of females was a key military strategy of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). The LRA abducted an estimated sixty thousand children—30 percent of which were girls—who were used as combatants, porters, domestic workers, and were forced to marry male commanders. Roughly ten thousand of these abducted girls became pregnant from sexual violence, and gave birth to two or more children each. This paper explores the realities of mothering in the aftermath of wartime sexual violence. Drawing upon interviews with a sample of twenty-seven northern Ugandan mothers who bore children as a result of wartime rape, the paper explores the ambivalence and complexities of mothering in the postwar period—including sexual violence, pregnancy and mothering during LRA captivity, as well as stigma and rejection, and changing family structures in the postwar period. The paper highlights the ways in which war shapes and informs all aspects of mothering—both during and following the conflict—and how it alters how women come to understand their life stories as part of the motherline. We conclude with key implications for service provision and policy
“Music and Mensis” or the Deconstruction of the Pregnancy and Childbirth Metaphor in Ntozakae Shange’s “oh—i’m 10 months pregnant”
Get PDFTo reimagine the pregnancy and childbirth metaphor, which, in general, perpetuates the mind-body split between creation and procreation, not only must the poet write about her personal experience of procreation but she must metapoetically confront the dichotomy separating this experience from her creativity. By doing so, she implies that procreativity is an experience to be related poetically and that a poem is the product of the mind and body creating and procreating. For the African American woman poet, the reckoning is even more fraught, for the Black woman’s body has historically been divided “into two neat categories: Sexed and Unsexed” (Mahurin 330). Ntozake Shange attempts to resist the above binaries in her poem “oh—i’m 10 months pregnant.” She insists both on the embodied mind, creating babies and poems, and on the impossibility of dividing women into sexed and unsexed by focusing on the very condition and action proving the existence of both: pregnancy and childbirth. This article shows how throughout the poem, Shange defies conventional use of punctuation and language, and actually pokes fun at the notion that poetry and babies are analogous. She does so by critiquing medical discourse and playing with the limits of metaphor. Ultimately, because the resolution of the pregnancy and the production of the poem both depend on Shange’s likening her baby to language, this paradoxically becomes an admission about the material and metaphorical connection between books and babies
Toward a New Understanding of Maternal Self-Care During Family Crisis: Initiating a Shared Legacy of Strength and Hope
Get PDFThis narrative explores the author’s experience of suddenly ecoming a caregiver for a spouse while also caring for minor children. The author uses reflection and research to describe what she learned about self-care, how she integrated her needs with the needs of her children, and why prevailing concepts of self-care as an individual construct can undermine its effective conceptualization and practice. The importance of self-care for caregivers is well documented, as is the failure of most caregivers to successfully achieve it. This failure carries particular poignancy for mothers of minor children. Studies document the academic, social, and emotional challenges that children experience when families face the upheaval associated with serious health problems. The children’s need to navigate new ways of being within their families requires the support of their mother, which can be difficult if she becomes too overburdened by her caregiving role. Avoiding this cycle requires better education for families in caregiving situations and the adoption of a new understanding of self-care for mothers. This article combines the experiences of one family with research about caregivers, the effect of paternal brain injury on children, and typical recovery phases. It shares insights about the importance of modelling effective self-care as a healthy maternal legacy
Being "Woman Woman": Performing Femininity at the Intersection of Motherhood, Womanhood, and the Academy
No full textGlobal trends of delayed motherhood, long-term postsecondary education, and the proliferation of assisted reproductive technologies have been associated with women who work in the academy as post-graduate students and professors. In 2015, I worked with postgraduate students at the University of Saskatchewan to explorehow these trends affect students’ imagined reproductive futures. In this paper, I examine the relationships among delayed motherhood, studenthood, and performances of femininity in the imagined reproductive futures of women postgraduate students. Whereas previous studies have focused on the disruption and (re)performanceof gender within the context of infertility, I examine how in participants’ imagined reproductive futures, it is their careers and education that they highlight as they negotiate gendered identities. I argue that by engaging with discourses and performances of “being a good mother” and the “superwoman” identity, participants repair the threat posed by academic and professional lives to their emininity, and they naturalize their imagined reproductive futures in which they are both academics, professionals, and mothers. In doing so, femininity is an assemblage enacted through participants’ own actions, words, and performances. By examining how postgraduatestudents enact performances of femininity in their imagined reproductive futures, motherhood scholars can open a discussion on the tensions between the cultural norms of parenthood and student culture
Placental Thinking for Mother-Centred Birth
Get PDFThis essay forwards the notion of “mother-centred” birth by engaging with contemporary placenta practices in a North American context, as grown from the revival of midwifery-based care. As a midwifery advocate and birth scholar, I want to reevaluate “birth” as a central category for social philosophy and human thriving. I want to see respectful, compassionate care for mothers’ wellbeing and quality of experience become central to the birth-giving and postpartum period. Enacting social philosophy through placental thinking, I extend the literal and metaphoric power of placentas toward the empowerment of mothers. Placentas have a tree-like structure and relational design that is a literal and metaphorical tree of life— nourishing roots that gestate the earliest gifts of mothering. Placental thinking for mother-centred birth considers mothers to be at the centre of birth, and seeks to empower mothers by highlighting the importance of the lived qualities of mothers’ birth and postpartum experiences
Curse to Co-creation: Religious Models of Labour Pain
Get PDFUntil the nineteenth century when labour pain became a technical problem to be solved, such pain was given religious meaning. Christian understandings of labour pain have long been based in interpretations of key Biblical texts, beginning with Genesis 3:16 and continuing with New Testament texts, which are understood to be commentary to this primary text. This article examines the four major spiritual models of labour pain that stem from these interpretations— curse of Eve, salvific, growth and perfectionist—and charts their rise and fall. The models are not distinct but intertwine and affect each other over time. The curse model—labour pain as punishment for Eve’s disobedience—was not used on its own but was most often paired with the salvation model or growth model so that the punishment of Eve was healing or generative. Salvation and growth intertwine as well in some understandings, as a woman’s spiritual and emotional growth lead to her active role in salvation history. The perfectionist model turns the curse model on its head, as it strives for a prelapsarian state in which women will not suffer the curse of Eve. Perfectionism in this sense is a belief that one can return, in this world, to a perfect union with God, a form of divinization. In conclusion, the four models are seen to have adapted to the secular transformation of pregnancy and labour, offering a potential model comingling pain and pleasure, spirit and body
