Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (JMI - York University)
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1824 research outputs found
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Only Mom Can Save the World: Myths of Salvation and Destruction in Post-Apocalyptic Film
Full text linkA version of this paper was originally given at the Motherhood to Motherhoods: Ideologies of the ‘Feminine’ conference at Chapman University in April 2023. It presents a comparative textual analysis of two recent films dealing with mothering in the post-apocalypse—A Quiet Place (2018) and Bird Box (2018)—to examine a new maternal myth taking shape, which I call “only mom can save the world.” This work is broken into four sections. The first section confronts the irrefutability of white, heteronormative family structure in these works. The second section examines maternal subjectivity on screen. The third section deals with maternal regret, and the fourth section questions “mother love” as representative of a ubiquitous and unfailing survival strategy. I argue that although these films ostensibly present very different formulations of motherhood, they both ultimately work to affirm or re-establish white, middle-class heteronormative motherhood as the most vital form of emotional and social connection in the face of a collapsing world. Current myths of motherhood tell us that when deployed correctly, “mother love” has the power to shape the future. Considering contemporary anxieties surrounding ecological and economic disasters in our world, the need to examine these problematic myths takes on new weight and immediacy
The Outlawed Nipple: Breastless Parents and the Desire to Conform to Normative Motherhood
Full text linkMaternal feminist theory and normative motherhood are influenced by a repronormativity that assumes all birthing people will breastfeed or chestfeed their infants. However, there is a predominant absence of a critical analysis of breast and chestfeeding from maternal theory and normative motherhood. Many new parents—for example, trans parents who have had chest masculinization surgery and parents who have had double mastectomies—do not have the privilege or ability to breast or chestfeed. For these breastless parents, the dilemma they face is intensified by normative motherhood discourses that essentialize good parenting as hetero-normative and repronormative, along with “breast is best” propaganda espousing erroneous health benefits. In this article, I argue that breastfeeding mandates are ubiquitous and misguided, in part due to an unspoken and assumed aspect of normative mothering, which has diluted the way health and perinatal care systems support breastless parents. This article centres repronormativity and transnormativity, ideologies entrenching the gender binary into its most rigid form, as intrinsic structures to normative motherhood. Understanding these concepts illustrates the harm inflicted on gender-nonconforming (or maternal nonconforming) identities embodying parenting. To combat this embodied shame and discrimination, I outline a conceptual framework for transnormative parenthood delineated by queer, intersectional, and ambivalent dictates
Mamie Till-Mobley: Paradox and Poetics of Racialized Public Motherhood in Chinonye Chukwu’s Till (2022)
Full text linkThrough an analysis of Chinonye Chukwu’s 2022 film Till, this article explores how Mamie Till-Mobley’s motherhood is cinematically represented. Focusing on director Chinonye Chukwu’s matrifocal lens, it analyzes racialized public motherhood and its painful containment of mothers within the institution of motherhood alongside radical and life-affirming possibilities for mothering in the wake of Black maternal necropolitics. This article looks at how racialized public motherhood allows mothers to continue the work of mothering and affirming their children’s humanity and the value of their lives even when all that remains of them is their dead bodies. It explores the multiple, often difficult strategies Mamie Till-Mobley employed in the fight to lovingly shape the meaning of her son’s life and death that have profoundly changed the course of American history. In this way, I connect this historical example of racialized public motherhood in Mamie’s practice to its contemporary, local, and intersectional implications. This article highlights the long line of Black maternal activists that have followed Mamie, as Black children are still dying from police violence and other forms of anti-Blackness, and closes with reflections on the cost to Black mothers and the tensions around Black women’s subjectivity. It aims to show how continued racial violence in the United States necessarily connects the struggle of mothers across temporalities
“Your Children Will Soon be Forgotten:”: 12 Years a Slave and the ‘Seeding’ of Black Motherhood
Full text linkThis paper investigates how the 2013 film 12 Years a Slave, through the character of Eliza, makes visible struggles associated with Black motherhood that persist today as interlocking systems and institutions of oppression. Although Eliza occupies the narrative periphery, her experience of sudden loss and grief feels current as modern Black mothers confront sudden familial separation, grief, the disparagement of Black women’s health, and societal forgetting of Black children. While liberalisms would have us embrace the idea that chattel slavery no longer affects modern American society, this article insists that those connections be attended to if we are to understand contemporary challenges to modern-day Black motherhood. Finally, this article asserts that Black motherhood be characterized as one that elevates traditions, such as kinship, nurtures collective families, and moves beyond surviving to thriving to ensure that our children not be forgotten
Quarantine Mothering and Working at Home: How Institutions of Higher Education Supported (or Failed to Support) Academic Mothers
Full text linkThis mixed methods study explores whether and how explicit policies, implicit practices, and internal communication from university administrators about aca-demic mothers’ work lives and expectations were impacted by the 2020 COVID-19 quarantine protocols. As this was a large study focussing on university policies addressing the presence of children on campus and the ways in which their enforcement or nonenforcement affected the personal and professional lives of faculty, we used purposive sampling (Palys) and snowball sampling (Patton) to distribute a survey in academic social media groups and to professional organization listservs (Palys). Among other things, the survey asked participants to report how well they thought their university was handling the COVID-19 pandemic and invited them to participate in an in-depth interview. As a result of the survey responses, we subsequently interviewed nineteen academic mothers from a range of academic disciplines, ages, and types of institutions, until we reached theoretical saturation (Strauss and Corbin). The semi-structured interview protocol included questions about the impact of COVID-19-related policies, practices, and messaging regarding children on participants’ job satisfaction, mental and physical health, as well as work-life balance. We used open and axial coding (Strauss and Corbin) and the constant comparative method (Glaser and Strauss) to analyze the data. We then triangulated the data by comparing interview and survey findings, engaging multiple researchers in the analysis, and conducting peer debriefings (Denzin and Lincoln; Lincoln and Guba). Findings highlight institutional policies and practices that serve or fail to serve faculty in terms of supporting their professional advancement in teaching, research, and service
Parenting during a Pandemic: Mothers and Disabled Children in Aotearoa/New Zealand—A Hidden Minority
Full text linkEvery country has its own COVID-19 pandemic story; similarly, every family has their own experiences of lockdowns, isolation, illness, death, struggles, and resiliency related to the pandemic. Although myriad narratives appear about these familial and societal experiences, few explore those of mothers of disabled children; these have been largely invisible, and as a result, this minority group and their needs have failed to be addressed by those who make decisions and plan for public health crises and for the subsequent recovery.
Autoethnography, a qualitative method that coalesces personal experience and research literature to advance sociological understanding, underpins this exploration. The authors are New Zealand/Aotearoa mothers of disabled children. Our approach employs autoethnographic reflection about our pandemic experiences to create mean-ing, forge identities, and explore power structures. Connections of our family stories enable the creation of an understanding of what has happened in our communities.
The authors’ reflections on their pandemic experiences are woven together with stories of how governments, schools, public health organizations, disability organizations, healthcare providers and communities directed us and responded to or failed to address our needs. We have identified five interwoven themes throughout our stories: anxiety, invisibility, devalued lives, coping, and advocacy. Together, as an outcome of the autoethnographic study of our pandemic experiences, we offer ideas for survival to pass on to mothers for future disasters and crises. Furthermore, we have developed recommendations for organizations and others living with disability
Pandemic-Intensified Motherhood: Making Sense of Increased Mothering Pressures during COVID-19
Full text linkThe COVID-19 pandemic and resultant stay-at-home orders and school shutdowns initiated a period of unprecedented household labour and childrearing for families across the world. Through in-depth qualitative interviews with seventy-six mothers from across the United States, I examine the increased demands placed on mothers as a result of the stay-at-home orders and the role of existing social and structural factors in fostering and maintaining these demands. I utilize the lens of intensive mothering to understand how mothers made sense of the augmented workload during the pandemic as well as the ways intensive mothering influences how mothers adapt to and meet these increased demands
Mothering, Masking Up, and Sarah Blake’s Clean Air: A Maternal Ecocritical Reading
Full text linkDuring the last two-plus years, COVID-19 has exposed the fissures in the framework of how societies treat mothers. The pandemic has highlighted issues of motherhood that were already present but artfully disguised. This paper aims to analyze those challenges in the context of a newly published cli-fi thriller novel. Clean Air, by Sara Blake, is a matrifocal novel that tells the story of a mother who survives a climate catastrophe, in which the pollen from trees and plants overtakes the earth. The human beings who survive this event cannot go outdoors without special masks, mirroring our experience during the first months of the pandemic. In this project, I explore how critical issues related to mothering are amplified in the contexts of major social upheavals: pandemics, wars, or in the case of this novel, a major climate crisis. The intersection of ecocriticism and maternal theory provides a valuable lens to analyze maternal anxiety, maternal ambivalence, work-life balance, maternal guilt, grieving daughterhood, and imperfect motherhood, which are all present in the descriptions of this alternate reality. All of these motherhood issues are in the undercurrent of the maternal experience portrayed in this novel. However, I argue that the novel goes further than addressing the problems inherent in how we treat mothers under these circumstances. It provides helpful advice on moving forwards, mothering on your own terms, and choosing happiness, suggesting a path towards accepting ourselves as imperfect mothers and imperfect selves
“Falling Off a Cliff”: Mothering Disabled Children through the Pandemic and Beyond
Full text linkThe COVID-19 pandemic has taken a disproportionate toll on the lives of mothers of disabled children. These children have complex needs that require health, educational, and social care support services, but most of these services were cancelled or reduced because of COVID-19-related restrictions. In this article, a group of mother-researchers use a collaborative autoethnographic approach to highlight the essential role that mothers and carework play in social organization; identify gaps in services and systems due to COVID-19 policies; and provide suggestions to transform our social care support systems to better meet the needs of disabled children and their families