Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (JMI - York University)
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Envisioning a Different Journey: Negotiating Academe with a Chronically Ill Child
Get PDFTo combine the roles of mother, scholar, and professor means walking a precarious tight rope between our own hopes and expectations and larger constraints and options. These roles carry heavy social weight—with iconic images and high expectations of what is deemed suitable and satisfactory. The personal narrative that follows chronicles the author’s ten year journey of navigating these roles amid the daily reality of caring for a child with a degenerative life-threatening illness. The essay discusses examples of best practices that higher education faculty and administrators may execute to create a culture of care in academe
The Hierarchy of Motherhood in Adoption: Literary Narratives of Kinship, Maternal Desire, and Precarity
Get PDFHow have women’s (in)ability to reproduce, (un)desire to mother, or essentialist understandings of birth mothering, biomothering, or adoptive mothering been represented in literature? Narratives of adoption and mothering can trouble the boundaries of reproduction, reveal cultural anxieties surrounding the idea of maternal desire, and, thereby, invite transgressions of the definitions and boundaries of moth- erhood. Investigating the portrayal of adoption and mothering in literature opens up what Denise Cuthbert, Kate Murphy and Marian Quartly consider, “a much needed critical space for thinking about the family and mothering in non-essentialist ways which challenge the dominant script of family and motherhood” (412). When examining a selection of literary works—including Jackie Kay’s novella length poem “The Adoption Papers,” a selection of short stories from Elyse Gasco’s collection Can You Wave Bye Bye Baby, Zona Gale’s story “Adoption,” and the fictionalized memoir by Jennifer Gilmore, <em>The Mothers</em>—which characterizations of “mother” perpetuate, and which challenge dominant normative definitions of womanhood, and bio-essentialist notions of mothering? Structures of inequality and economics, lingering binaries of who can and should mother and the construction of “good” and “bad” mother can also place adoptive and biological mothers into a position of precarity. In deconstructing all these narratives, the reader can reflect on the tensions in the perceptions of adoptive and birth mothers and question attendant notions of attachment, suitability, and authenticity: in particular, the assumption of maternal desire for all women, the places of precarity for birth mothers and adoptive mothers, and hierarchical notions of “real mother.
The Battle of Bad Mothers: The Film Mama as a Commentary on the Judgment of Solomon and on Contemporary Motherhood
No full textThe modern horror film genre has incessantly dealt with questions of parenthood, pregnancy and the status of mothers, particularly with “bad mothers.”From the heart of popular culture, horror films engage in these issues unexpectedly, and sometimes even radically. These films enable us to recognize cultural taboos and to expose secrets that are not expressed in other genres. In this article, we examine the successful horror film, Mama (2013) that centres on two “bad mothers” involved in a fatal conflict over two girls. Through a comparison between Mama and the biblical myth of the judgment of Solomon, with which it dialogues and comments upon, we investigate the cultural hierarchy existing between two types of bad mothers, whom we term the “overfeeding mother” and the “starving mother.” The film disassembles and deconstructs this cultural hierarchy, while clarifying its social motivations. Proposing a radical alternative to Solomon’s judgment, the movie challenges the prevalent conception of bad mothering by exposing both mothers’ human faces, hence acquitting them in the eyes of the viewers
The Chemical Pregnancy: Technology, Mothering, and the Making of a Reproductive Experience
Get PDFThis paper examines the significance of the chemical pregnancy as a new reproductiveexperience in the United States today. Early pregnancy testing initiallydetects the presence of hcg, the so-called pregnancy hormone, but later testing thengives negative results or there are other signs that the pregnancy is not developing.What a woman might have described as a “late” period becomes recognized as anearly miscarriage or a chemical pregnancy. Building on feminist scholarship inanthropology, sociology, and science and technology studies, the chemical pregnancyis discussed in terms of the contradictions and complications of technology, reproduction,and mothering. The chemical pregnancy initially comes into view as anatural, not-new experience that technology apparently has rendered knowable.Yet, on closer examination, it is evident that the chemical pregnancy is a cultural“fix” for the uncertainties that women face at an historical moment when there islittle tolerance for the ambiguities and ambivalences that surround pregnancies.The chemical pregnancy is discussed as an experience of and metaphor for disruptedreproduction and disrupted mothering. The opportunities that reproductive technologiesseem to offer are not always available or accessible; at the same time, theybecome new responsibilities for mothers
The Relative Merits of Three Methodological Approaches to Studying Women’s Reproductive Health
Get PDFWhat methodological approaches might motherhood scholars use to better understandwomen’s experiences of their reproductive health across generations and over time? Traditional quantitative and qualitative longitudinal methodologies have strengthsand limitations as illustrated using examples drawn from the maternal and familialliterature. Data collected across generational cohorts using traditional longitudinalmethods illuminates the complexities of family histories but comes with attendantproblems of participant attrition, dips in team interest and commitment, and theshifting appetite for knowledge. The intergenerational life story approach offers analternative that is less time consuming and less resource intensive. Narrative threadscollected during the Life Story Project illustrate the relative merits of this alternativemethod of inquiry into the ways that women learn about and share reproductivehealth information within families and across generations