Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (JMI - York University)
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Masculine Expansions of Othermothering in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, Jazz, and Beloved
Get PDFOthermothering in African American communities began as a system of childcare but has evolved into the care of individuals in need. Toni Morrison’s work presents myriad examples of othermothering performed by black women. Perhaps more intriguing are the sites where othermothering as a system of care work in Morrison’s novels serves to subvert gender and race norms. Some critics argue that Morrison’s depictions of female-centric othermothering allow black men to shirk parental and communal responsibilities and assign less responsibility to black men for carrying on the traditions and culture of the African American community than black women. However, this article examines how male othermothering in <em>Beloved</em>, <em>Jazz</em>, and <em>A Mercy</em> expands the master narrative of the ideal (black or white) mother by refuting gender roles and the naturalization of women as better suited to care giving. Morrison’s depictions of masculine othermothering as a valuable source of care challenge the ideology of the nuclear family for its primacy as a family model
Poverty and Power: The Moral Regulation of Single Mother University Students
Get PDFThe university was designed with the traditional student in mind. Students who are sole-support parents often have difficulties negotiating their experiences and expectations as a student with those that arise as a parent. This paper uses institutional ethnographic interviews conducted in the summer and fall of 2011 with eight single mothers who are postsecondary students in order to better understand the barriers that they face while obtaining a postsecondary education. This paper explores the theme of power and moral regulation from the interviews. I begin by describing the concept of moral regulation and use this concept as a theoretical base to explore the experiences of shame, violence, scrutiny, stigma and resistance that arose throughout the interviews and in the literature
Experiments in Voice and Visibility: Creating Space for Graduate Student (Single) Mothers in the Mother-Free Space of the Academy
Get PDFIn my doctoral department, the invisibility of my situation as a single mother andthe way it was so often at odds with academic culture left me feeling alienated frommy peers and my community. In an effort to balance school and single motherhood,to make visible the reality of my situation, and to connect more deeply with my ac-ademic community, I begin a series of research experiments in voice and visibility.These projects often involved my son, as he was an inextricable part of my situationas a mother. Moreover, his life and our relationship were undoubtedly impacted by“my situation” as a graduate student. In this essay, I discuss a few experiments invoice and visibility that were instrumental to getting through my doctoral program.These projects involved risk, creative strategies, and lots and lots of support fromother members of my community. I hope sharing these stories might inspire othergraduate student mothers to push through even when it feels impossible. Likewise, Ihope faculty members and graduate students will be inspired to support and empowerthe mothers in their respective departments
Moving My Brain to Canada: Motherhood and International Mobility as an Academic Career Requirement
Get PDFThis article highlights the challenges encountered by mothers in academe who face the demand of international mobility as a career requirement. In order to call attention to some of the policies and strategies that best empower mothers who move, I use qualitative and quantitative studies that document the different implications of academic mobility policies for men and women and their “gendering and stratifying effects on academic careers” (Leemann and Boes 213) in conversation with some of the insights I gained through my personal experience as a mother and as a postdoctoral fellow, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, conducting independent research in Canada. While I locate the ideal, readily mobile and unencumbered young Swiss researcher within cultural expectations that consider mothers as primary or sole caregivers of children, I question the persistent rhetoric of sacrifice both in the maternal and in the professional academic domains. I also call attention to the tendency to silence personal experience and circumstances in most discourses promoting academic mobility to early career researchers
Next, the Campus Interview: An Elegy for Graduate Student Mothers
Get PDFThis article offers a frank and candid picture of a mother managing the ins and outs of academic study and a campus interview for a tenure-track position. It offers a creative interrogation into the cultural conversation following motherhood in graduate school and points honestly and openly to a variety of responses in the author’s experience. The article ultimately aims to make known the reality of campus visitsfor mothers and shed light on the cultural discomfort around the issues of academe and mothering
Maternal Ecocriticism and the Ecology of Motherhood in Jean Toomer’s Cane
Get PDFIn <em>Cane</em>, Jean Toomer illustrates that human corporeality is tethered to the material world, a concept that feminist theorist Stacy Alaimo, in Bodily Natures, refers to as “transcorporeality.” Human bodies are not inured to their environment but are affected by the flow and substances of matter in which they are surrounded. In this modernist text, the natural world is enmeshed with female bodies, both seemingly carrying the dna of the other. The assemblage of the agrarian South, African American women, and scenes of racial violence coalesce and construct a narrative of violated fertility and motherhood. The women of Cane are denied their motherhood because their bodies and being cannot be divorced from the trans-Atlantic trade route, plantation labour practices, and unsustainable logging of old-growth pine forests in post-Reconstruction Georgia. This article examines moments of transcorporeal exchange in <em>Cane</em> (i.e., felled pine trees and fetuses, and maternal bodies and cotton fields) and, in so doing, provides an ecocritical reading of mothering and material interconnectivity—a maternal ecocritical reading—of Toomer’s masterpiece of the Harlem Renaissance