Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (JMI - York University)
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Mothering-ArtAdemics: Intersecting Identities of Strength
Get PDFUsing personal narratives as a feminist approach to produce knowledge, we explore theoretical positions that acknowledge the interdependency of maternal, artistic, and academic identities. This approach, while critical of societal structures that fail to support working mothers and young children, outlines the benefits of creative practice, teaching, and mothering rather than viewing the experience as a deficit. Through interwoven personal narratives we reflect on our journeys becoming mothers on the tenure-track and reinventing our artmaking practices as academic mothers. Each subtopic outlines individual experiences, offering the reader two different paths toward applying for tenure while creating a family. Through our narratives we illustrate the ways in which our art practices grew when becoming mothers, due in part to time constraints, a desire to work without toxic art materials, and with conceptual shifts that address mothering in our artmaking. In conclusion, we argue for increased structural change to support successful mothering academics that ranges from increasing partner participation around domestic work to federally funded, mandated maternity and paternity leave
"All Those Years, I Kept Him Safe": Maternal Practice as Redemption and Resistance in Emma Donoghue's Room
Get PDFPhilosopher Sara Ruddick argues in Maternal Thinking that maternal practice is characterized by three demands: preservation, growth, and social acceptance. “To be a mother,” Ruddick argues, “is to be committed to meeting these demands by works of preservative love, nurturance, and training” (17). The first duty of mothers is to protect and preserve their children: “to keep safe whatever is vulnerable and valuable in a child” (80). The second demand requires mothers to nurture the child’s emotional and intellectual growth. The third demand of training and social acceptability of children, Ruddick emphasizes, “is made not by children’s needs but by the social groups of which a mother is a member. Social groups require that mothers shape their children’s growth in ‘acceptable’ ways. What counts as acceptable varies enormously within and among groups and cultures” (21). The article examines how the mother in the novel Room performs the three demands of maternal practice in both captivity and freedom. It considers how her strategies of preservation and care—in particular keeping her son with her in Room, her close bond with her son, and her act of extended breastfeeding—are reconstructed as bad mothering upon freedom as the first strategy is read as maternal selfishness and the second two are read as violations of social acceptability, particularly for a male child. The article argues that only when the mother reclaims the maternal authenticity of her maternal practice in Room can she and her son reclaim their connection and achieve healing
Advance Forward Moms! A Paradigm for an Online Community of Working Mothers That Actually Works
Get PDFThis article examines a particular Facebook group that aspires to empower and support working mothers, and, through a narrative and anecdotal approach, analyzes the discourse of the group. The struggles of working mothers in the Western world in general, and in Israel in particular, are ever-present. This article aims to show how in the face of these challenges, this group, through a mother-centred approach of empowerment and community, might be a paradigm for how social media not only reflects the lived experience of working mothers, but can also make changes in the way working mothers see themselves and in the way they face challenges in the personal and professional realms. The foundation of this Israeli Facebook group—called IMAKADIMA: Working and Career-Minded Moms in Israel—is that career and motherhood can and should coexist rather than being an overwhelming juggling act or compromise. At its core is the belief that a community of like-minded working mothers can provide practical and moral support in the areas of work-life balance, and equality in the home and workforce. This article examines various categories of interaction in this group—networking and assistance, work-mother balance, personal development, gender roles, and empowerment—to show that the dominant attitude of mutual encouragement and empowerment outweighs the negative aspects of social media groups
Maternal Desires and Compulsory Motherhood: The Metaphor of "the Child of the Night" in Women's Reproductive Fantasies
Get PDFMaternal desires have been explored from contrasting approaches in psychoanalysis. Women’s urges to have children have roughly said been put into two categories: positive maternal desires and compulsive or corrupted maternal urges. But can a perspective be developed, that holds together both sides without either idealizing or denigrating maternal desires? Can maternal subjectivity and ambivalence be appreciated without blaming the mother for negative aspects of maternal desires? This article is an attempt to present such a perspective with the works of Italian psychoanalyst Silvia Vegetti Finzi and her idea of the metaphor of omnipotence called “the child of the night.” Her theory has inspired my clinical work; psychoanalytic psychotherapy with women who are not yet mothers. Inspired by psychoanalytic ideas about the value of holding together opposites for reflection and by feminist critique of societal dynamics, I describe a way to use metaphors for omnipotent fantasies to deepen our understanding of maternal desires. If women are to find their own definitions of mothering in a feminist and matricentric sense, we may help as clinicians and scholars by holding space for the omnipotent fantasy trope of the child of the night
Hear Our Collective Voices! Mother Survivors and Activist Movement to End Violence Against Women with Children
Get PDFThis article examines the experiences of women with children fleeing violence and survivor-activists in Ontario. Mothers are speaking out about systemic barriers and diminishing state support for women and their children fleeing violence within state systems responsible for protecting them. Lack of safe, affordable housing and universal child care supports and policing and child welfare interventions that fail to support women and their children’s safety are most harshly realized by Indigenous, racialized, and low-income women with children seeking violence-free lives (Cull; Mann; Greaves et al.; Sinclair). Our aim is to shed light on state systems failing women with children fleeing violence; state policies retrenching race, gender, and class inequalities; and alternative accountability models for survivor-activists organizing to address systemic oppression. We argue that survivor activism in Ontario is crucial both within and outside the state to drive fundamental change and state accountability for violence against women at community and provincial levels
