21st-Century Narratives of Maternal Ambivalence

Motherhood has long been depicted in reductive or limited terms. At once valorized and configured as the ultimate end-goal for socially condoned femininity, maternity is also highly mediated and scrutinized. This has resulted in a representational tradition that persists in imagining maternal subjects in rigid binary terms, pitting good mothers against bad. Largely in response to this repressive schema, recent years have marked the emergence of a diverse range of visual and literary texts about motherhood. While such texts vary in style, genre and form, this book argues that they are unified in their efforts to publicize embodied maternal experience and foreground maternal ambivalence, a concept that is best understood as a mother's capacity to simultaneously love and hate her child. Although maternal ambivalence has become an increasingly popular topic of study with maternal scholars, its articulation within contemporary representations and narratives has yet to be adequately theorized and addressed, and this book aims to fill this gap.

Critically examines new twenty-first century texts about motherhood Considers how maternal ambivalence can be used as a structural framework for reimagining subjectivity as relational Offers an original perspective on the transformative shift from maternal ambivalence to maternal resilience

Auteur
Rachel Williamson is a policy advisor and senior trainer at domestic violence specialist organization SHINE (Safer Homes in New Zealand Everyday), working with employers and government departments to recognize and respond appropriately to staff experiencing domestic violence. She obtained her PhD in Cultural Studies from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. Her articles have appeared in Continuum, Labour and Industry and In Media Res, and she has two chapters in the edited collections Maternal Connections: When Daughter Becomes Mother and Maternal Regret: Resistances, Renunciations, and Reflections.

Contenu

1. Introduction: 'An Exquisite Suffering'.- 2. Contextualizing Ambivalence: Intensive Mothering Under Neoliberalism.- 3. 'It Takes a Village': Resisting the Repudiation of the 'Bad' Mother.- 4. Embodying Ambivalence: Abjection and the Problematic Maternal Body.- 5. The Body in Extremis: Vocalizing Maternal Corporeality.- 6. Surviving Motherhood: From Maternal Ambivalence to Maternal Resilience.- 7. Strange and Wild: Towards an Aesthetics of Ambivalence.