Representations of Motherhood

by Bassin, Donna; Honey, Margaret; Kaplan, Meryle Mahrer

• ISBN13: 9780300068634
• ISBN10: 0300068638
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1996-09-01
• Publisher: Yale Univ Pr

Summary

Offering new perspectives on motherhood, distinguished contributors from a variety of fields focus on the importance of seeing the mother as a subject, a person in her own right, by looking at the complex issue of how motherhood is represented. Contributors seek to understand the impact of culturally constructed images of motherhood in art, film, literature, and the social and behavioral sciences; they dignify the craft of motherhood, viewing maternal work as an experience grounded in social and political realities; and they probe conscious and unconscious maternal experience. From their several perspectives, contributors view the maternal subject as one who can give voice to her own experience and both appropriate and resist representations of motherhood.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
The Acknowledgment and Appropriation of Maternal Work
Thinking Mothers/Conceiving Birth	p. 29
Fictions of Home	p. 46
Shifting the Center: Race, Class, and Feminist Theorizing about Motherhood	p. 56
The Mothers of the Disappeared: Passion and Protest in Maternal Action	p. 75
Maternity and Memory: Toni Morrison's Beloved	p. 92
The Paradoxical Nature of the Maternal Position
Being a Mother and Being a Psychoanalyst: Two Impossible Professions	p. 113
The Omnipotent Mother: A Psychoanalytic Study of Fantasy and Reality	p. 129
Mothering, Hate, and Winnicott	p. 147
Maternal Subjectivity in the Culture of Nostalgia: Mourning and Memory	p. 162
Rosalind: A Family Romance	p. 174
The Cultural Construction and Reconstruction of the Maternal Image
Images of the Maternal: An Interview with Barbara Kruger	p. 198
The Power of "Positive" Diagnosis: Medical and Maternal Discourses on Amniocentesis	p. 204
The Maternal Voice in the Technological Universe	p. 220
Thinking the Nature Out of Mother	p. 240
Sex, Work, and Motherhood: Maternal Subjectivity in Recent Visual Culture	p. 256
Playing and Motherhood; or, How to Get the Most Out of the Avant-Garde	p. 272
List of Contributors	p. 283
Index	p. 285
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