Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (JMI - York University)
Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (JMI - York University)Not a member yet
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Envisioning Mothers: Visualizations and the Invisibility of Motherhood
Get PDFWomen in the U.S. and Canada pay a substantial social and economic penalty for becoming mothers. And though the existence of a “motherhood penalty” has been extensively demonstrated, motherhood itself has not been widely recognized as a marginalized identity. In this article, I review several popular visualizations (graphical representations, imagery, infographics, etc.) used to depict inequality and oppression to propose that—despite mothers paying a motherhood penalty—motherhood remains an invisible category in current representations of social inequity. I suggest that by subsuming mothers under the category of “women,” current visualizations obscure how gender discrimination (particularly economic discrimination) results from women’s status as “mothers” rather than their status as “women.” As a result, we miss the central role that motherhood plays in women’s social and economic oppression. Motherhood is rarely recognized as an identity that contributes to women’s inequality, and I argue here that this is partially due to its invisibility in popular visualizations of oppression. As a result, I argue that motherhood should appear as an analytic category in our popular visualization of oppression to increase its visibility as a marginalized identity. Such visibility would increase social justice activism around issues of motherhood and would raise public awareness of motherhood as a significant social identity within the context of oppression and inequality
(Re)Making Choice and Autonomy in Publicly Provided Maternity Healthcare
Get PDFThis article is concerned with healthcare institutions’ principles of choice and autonomy in the care practices of maternity healthcare provided by the Nordic welfare state. The issue is explored through analysis of institutional ethnographic material collected at four different maternity healthcare clinics in one large city in Finland. The analysis shows that nurses remake the medical institutions’ demands for choice and autonomy in healthcare. In the nurses’ experience-based knowledge of pregnancy, choice is not just a static activity but something that is achieved through a process of coming to know one’s choices. Choice as a process involves experiencing pregnancy, and the nurses’ respect for this process can be understood as enabling motherhood. The nurses encourage the women to be self-reliant and autonomous. This increasing demand for choice and autonomy may also be interpreted as a demand of consumer capitalism. The welfare service response has been to treat women to an extent as neoliberal reflexive individuals, in effect, responsible for their own motherhood. These nursing approaches to providing choice and autonomy for pregnant women both potentially enable and control motherhood
