Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (JMI - York University)
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Beyond “Sharenting” a Cute Teething Baby Face: Maternal Agency in the Facebook Page of Ibuprofen-Based Analgesics for Children
Get PDFTeething is an ordeal for everyone in the family. Mothers are more likely than fathers to look for tips and ideas online for soothing a baby back to sleep. For this purpose, they are also more inclined to use social media that they can access through smartphone applications, such as Facebook. And because women are still the gateway to health-product sales, they are the primary target market for the advertising of pediatric drugs online, including teething pain-relief products. Recent studies have indicated that a large proportion of millennials believe that most marketing campaigns are not tailored to them. These women have trouble both identifying with the nuclear family as well as with recognizing themselves in the usual stereotypes. They find user-generated content more trustworthy and memorable than traditional brand-generated content. In this context, one may wonder how pharmaceutical companies have adapted their advertising discourse in social media in order to get the so-called digital women influencers to participate in the construction of the millennial caring mother. Drawing on recent works in the critical analysis of discourse, I deploy Michael Halliday’s systemic functional grammar, and more precisely the transitivity system and its processes, to study the content of a Facebook page dedicated to the promotion of over-the-counter ibuprofen-based analgesics for children. This allows me to identify how the emphasis that has been placed on the efficacy of drugs contributes to overshadowing the nightmarish labour that is necessary to care for a sick child
Text, Tea, and Sympathy: How Sharing Stories About Child Loss Became an Invaluable Part of the Healing Process for a Pack of Bereaved Mothers
No full textIn this article, I explore how losing a much-wanted first pregnancy at fourteen weeks, at the critical age of thirty-five, inspired me to look at the healing opportunities among communities of women who had lost pregnancies or children by the writing and sharing of stories. At the time of my loss, I was studying for a master’s in literature and found comfort and encouragement in the texts of Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath who, even during the darkest, freshest moments of despair, felt the urge to write. One of the my professors during this period was Suzette Henke, the preeminent voice in female trauma narrative, who had coined the phrase “scriptotherapy.” Henke encouraged me to heal how other women had done for centuries—in letters to sisters, diary entries, to do lists—by writing and publishing my work. Sharing pain allowed the tormented to feel part of a collective whole, I realized, and writing allowed women to unload psychological trauma, and reading or listening to it allowed them to form healthy connections. Using my research, I set up a free writing workshop for grieving mothers. Strong, heartbroken, kind women would gather together to cry, share, write and discuss each other’s work for three hours once a month from January until May 2016. The results are a remarkable testimony to the power of healing and recovery through scriptotherapy, their hearts written on to every page and in this article
If the Exosuit Fits: Becoming the Alien Queen in Alien and Aliens
No full textHistorically, Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) and James Cameron’s Aliens (1986) have attracted an exorbitant amount of scholarship focusing on the numerous representations of the maternal body scattered throughout the pair of films. However, the majority of criticism tends to restrict the narrative in each film by structuring it as a binary opposition between Ellen Ripley and the Alien Queen, each seemingly embodying the role of “good” and “bad” mother respectively. In this article, I argue that the relationship between these two maternal figures is not so easily reduced to the strict dichotomy between “good” and monstrous body; in fact, it is one of subjection. The following article incorporates Barbara Creed’s scholarship on Scott’s Alien to illustrate that the first film in the franchise pays close attention not only to the primordial archaic mother of the pre-Symbolic, but to how the traumatic experience of birth is internalized in the psychic realm. Furthermore, this article explores how this very experience of abjection facilitates a “turning toward” phallic Law in order to assuage the trauma of the originary loss. Using Judith Butler’s theory of homosexual melancholy, I argue that the Alien Queen in Cameron’s Aliens is not merely a horrifying phallic mother but an Absolute Subject of maternity that Ripley must embody to be recognized within the phallogocentric network of representation