Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (JMI - York University)
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Neoliberal Pedagogies of Motherhood at an Ontario Early Years Centre
Get PDFThis article examines how the neoliberal turn is shaping the realm of motherhood in Canada by focusing on the activities of government-funded Ontario Early Years Centres (OEYCs). New mothers are often targets for expert interventions that aim to fulfill particular political, economic, or social objectives. In the province of Ontario, many state-sanctioned messages about raising children are disseminated through OEYCs. I argue that OEYC activities are shaped by, and in turn reproduce, neoliberal values, techniques, and philosophies. Through their activities, OEYCs promote the values of responsibility, reliance on experts, risk management, and a commitment to self-improvement, thus inculcating in the participant mothers a subjectivity that is consistent with neoliberal objectives. This secures the optimal social reproduction of the future generation for the knowledge economy, while placing the entire responsibility for this on the shoulders of mothers. The case of the OEYCs illustrates the way in which the contemporary Canadian state acts on the most intimate areas of life to forge subjectivities that align people with neoliberal agendas
Presenting the Absent: Representation of Maternal Memory, Embodiment, and Motherhood in My Art
Get PDFMy paper discusses my drawings, paintings, and installations from the first decade of the 2000s, which have grown out of my experience of motherhood as a daughter, being pregnant, and mothering in the postnatal phase. The paper focuses on representation of these experiences in my art making, with specific reference to the nonfigurative expression of my works—that is to say, maternal mothered bodies, including mine, my mother’s, as well as my daughter’s, are absent in my emotive expression
"Mastomania" Breastfeeding and the Circulation of Desire in Nineteenth-Century France
Get PDFThe concept of sexual pleasure while breastfeeding, still faintly scandalous in the twenty-first century, circulates in a variety of nineteenth-century French texts, from medical discourse to the fictional works of Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola. Although some medical authorities condemned sensual breastfeeding, or “mastomania,” as a vice, others used the promise of sexual pleasure to entice recalcitrant mothers to breastfeed. In representations of maternal breastfeeding found in both literary and medical texts, it is often the male gaze that constructs meaning. The reciprocal desire of mother and infant shifts to include a third person, the narrator-spectator, whose own desire for the breast creates a fantasy of maternal erotic response that is then condemned as a vice. This confusion of subject and object of desire raises complex questions about the motivations of the male authors of these texts. This article uses psychoanalytic theories of Freud, Klein, and Kristeva to argue that the erotic dimension of the breastfeeding couple is tolerated, and even celebrated, in nineteenth-century literature but only if the male gaze constructs and controls the mother’s desire
Kibbutz Mothering in Transition: Bringing the Children Home
No full textMy generation of mothers on Kibbutz Hazorea is in the unique situation of having mothered in two contexts: the “normal” way and the kibbutz way, which involved communal sleeping arrangements for children. This system lasted until the 1991 Gulf War when the children moved home, leading to the de-facto end of collective education for kibbutz children. I investigate how the role of “mother” evolved in this transition from communal childrearing to full-parental responsibility as well as how the mothers felt about the transition. I also address what effect, if any, their own upbringing had on their experiences. I interviewed kibbutz mothers raised in communal education; kibbutz mothers who joined the kibbutz as adults; and a subgroup of women who worked as childcare givers (metaplot). Investigating the experience of mothering on kibbutz in its transition from collective childrearing to the traditional framework of the nuclear family can illuminate alternative perspectives of this unique kibbutz experience, focusing on whether and/or how the kibbutz prescription of mothering defined “mother” for the women who lived it