Motherhood and Space Configurations of the Maternal through Politics, Home, and the Body

by Hardy, Sarah; Wiedmer, Caroline

• ISBN13: 9781403967855
• ISBN10: 1403967857
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-01-08
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

This interdisciplinary collection explores the complex ways motherhood is experienced by studying the concrete and imaginary spaces mothers inhabit. The authors examine locations for birth, negotiations of domesticity, institutional framings of the mother's world, and maternal metaphors in art and popular culture. Using conceptions of space as a common lens, these essays articulate the interplay between motherhood as a cultural construction and motherhood as a lived experience. The collection as a whole reveals how the spaces of motherhood are varied, changing, and politically charged.

Author Biography

Sarah Hardy is Associate Professor and Chair, Department of English, Hampden Sydney College, Virginia. Caroline Wiedmer is Associate Scholar at Collegium Helveticum at the ETH in Zurich.

Table of Contents

List of Figures	xi
Acknowledgments	xiii
Introduction: Spaces of Motherhood	1	(14)
Sarah Hardy
Caroline Wiedmer
Part I Motherhood and Spaces of Civic Culture
MotherSpace: Disciplining through the Material and Discursive	15	(20)
Marsha Marotta
``Magdalene versus the Nation'': Ireland as a Space of Compulsory Motherhood in Edna O'Brien's Down by the River	35	(20)
Sara Gerend
An Office of One's Own: Stories of Power, Space, and Motherhood in the Swiss Academy	55	(18)
Caroline Wiedmer
The Maternity Hospital: Blueprint for Redesigning Childbirth	73	(14)
Leslie Kanes Weisman
The Birthplace	87	(18)
Barbara Katz Rothman
Wendy Simonds
Closer to Home: The Domestic in the Discourses of Upper-Middle-Class Pregnancy	105	(10)
Helena Michie
Naomi R. Cahn
Part II Motherhood and Spaces of Home
House and Home: Feminist Variations on a Theme	115	(34)
Iris Marion Young
Black Women and Motherhood	149	(12)
Patricia Hill Collins
Integrating Home and Wage Workplace: Women's Daily Lives in a Canadian Suburb	161	(24)
Isabel Dyck
Locating Lesbian Parent Families	185	(18)
Jacqui Gabb
Like a Mother: Paid ``Mother-work'' Performed in Private Spaces	203	(18)
Amy Mullin
``You just have to make a conscious effort to keep snapping away I think'': A Case Study of Family Photos, Mothering, and Familial Space	221	(22)
Gillian Rose
Part III Motherhood and Spaces of Embodiment
Uneasy Spaces: The Domestic Uncanny in Contemporary Installation Art	243	(18)
Fiona Carson
Winnicott's Maternal Aesthetic: Absorption and Beholding in Potential Space	261	(22)
Ellen Brinks
Pregnant Bodies as Public Spaces	283	(24)
Rebecca Kukla
Breeding Ambiguity: The Womb as Alien Space in the X-Files	307	(16)
Sarah Hardy
Notes on Contributors	323	(4)
Permissions	327	(2)
Index	329