Maternal Duty Research Articles

“The Story of You and Me”: Strategic Ambiguity in the Paratextual Reception of Kim Ji-Young, Born 1982

ABSTRACT This article explores the connection between the online commentary on the South Korean novel, and later film, Kim Ji-Young, Born 1982 (2016; film released in 2019), and the perception of feminism within South Korea. To capture how Kim Ji-Young’s “meaning” is entangled with popular beliefs about feminism, I analyze audience reception through Kim Ji-Young’s paratexts: (a) tweets and (b) comments responding to newspaper articles mentioning the novel and/or film Kim Ji-Young from the Korean platform Naver. I examine paratexts to reveal that the “meaning” Kim Ji-Young has in online spaces is not determined solely by the novel or film-as-referent. I show that Kim Ji-Young the source text has become inextricable from the mélange of preconceptions regarding what constitutes a “feminist” stance in Korea, ranging from the stereotype of the selfish “feminist” who shirks her maternal duty towards the nation to the discontent of stay-at-home moms. I show that online misogyny has forced those who support Kim Ji-Young’s feminist message to employ what rhetorician Leah Ceccarelli describes as “strategic ambiguity.” This involves simultaneously disavowing Kim Ji-Young‘s feminism while praising the text’s feminist politics, a tactic used to shield themselves from attacks by misogynistic trolls.

Self-management experience of first-time diagnosed gestational diabetes mellitus: A focus group interview.

Gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) has become the most common complication in women during pregnancy in Taiwan. Since several clinical trials have demonstrated benefits of aggressive treatment, which rely heavily on self-management. The present study was conducted to explore the self-management experience of women with first-time diagnosed GDM. A qualitative descriptive approach was applied to conduct this study. Purposive sampling was used to recruit patients with first-time diagnosed GDM from the maternity outpatient clinics of medical centre in Taiwan. A total of three focus groups interviews with 22 women were conducted to collect the data. Content analysis was applied to analyse the data. Four themes were identified: (1) unexpectedly having a high-risk pregnancy, (2) different perceptions for self-management, (3) implementation predicament of self-management and (4) maternal duty to ensure the safety of mother and child.

Gender, Populism, and the QAnon Conspiracy Movement.

According to one recent review of the burgeoning interdisciplinary scholarly literature on populism, populism’s “relationship with gender issues remains largely understudied” (Abi-Hassan, 2017, 426–427). Of those scholarly treatments that do exist, the lion’s share focus on the role of men and masculinity in populist movements. In this essay, I argue scholarly reflection on the relationship of gender and populism should not be limited to this narrow frame. Through a close examination of the complex gender politics of QAnon, a pro-Trump conspiracy movement that burst into the mainstream of U.S. politics and culture with the onset of the global Coronavirus pandemic, I demonstrate that populist deployments of femininity are as rich, complex, and potent as their deployments of masculinity. QAnon, I argue, is a case study in how femininity, particularly feminine identities centered on motherhood and maternal duty, can be mobilized to engage women in populist political projects. Until scholars of populism start asking Cynthia Enloe’s famous question, “Where are the women?,” in a sustained and rigorous way, phenomena that are integral to populism’s functioning will elude us and our understanding of the relationship between gender and populism will remain partial and incomplete (Enloe, 2014).

Politics in the Marketplace: Work, Gender, and Citizenship in Revolutionary France by Katie Jarvis

Reviewed by: Politics in the Marketplace: Work, Gender, and Citizenship in Revolutionary France by Katie Jarvis Elizabeth Colwill Katie Jarvis, Politics in the Marketplace: Work, Gender, and Citizenship in Revolutionary France (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2019). Pp. 352. $47.95 cloth. In this prize-winning book on the Dames des Halles of revolutionary Paris, Katie Jarvis brings to life a rich and multifaceted history of the female hawkers of produce, fish, and flowers whose retail privileges were first bestowed by Saint Louis in the thirteenth century. Jarvis maps the residences and market stalls of the Dames des Halles, listens to their disputes, and traces their steps through the muddy streets and into the turbulent halls of governance. The tableau that she paints is so richly textured that the reader can almost glimpse the Dames as they bargain with consumers, petition for currency reform, denounce monopoly-holders, and contest price limits. Delving deep into police, legislative, judiciary, and financial records, Jarvis illuminates the evolving moral economy of the Dames des Halles and their significance as revolutionary actors. Jarvis presents compelling evidence for the tangible political impact of the Dames des Halles during the early years of revolution—an influence rooted, as Rene Marion’s 1995 dissertation demonstrated, in the Dames’ corporate role in certifying the legitimacy of the early modern monarchy. “After the opening salvo of the Revolution,” Jarvis writes, “most Parisians readily accepted the Dames’ authority as the sovereign people incarnate” (50). Jarvis disentangles the voices of live Dames des Halles from the fictive “poissarde” stereotypes of the revolutionary pamphlet literature. While the pamphleteers drew upon the Dames’ words and reputations to advance their own political agendas, Jarvis shows how the market women manipulated and refashioned that political symbolism in their own interest, mobilizing their unique identity to influence popular politics, deputies, and legislative decisions. Melding an older corporate identity with a revolutionary sense of maternal and civic duty, the Dames hired a poet to compliment the electors of the Third Estate, organized processions and patriotic subscriptions, and called on Lafayette to forgive wet-nursing debts. After the March to Versailles, they strategically distanced themselves from the violent excesses of revolutionary activism, then requested medals from the municipal government as bonnes citoyennes. “Protectors of the nuclear and national family,” they exposed revolutionary plots and spanked recalcitrant nuns (69–75). By bestowing or withholding their allegiance to the monarch and speaking out as revolutionary mothers to patriotic father-deputies, they reshaped the nature of sovereignty. [End Page 1042] Politics in the Marketplace situates the Dames squarely in the public sphere—not the public sphere of letters but in the hubbub of les Halles teeming with wholesalers, consumers, retail merchants, and government inspectors. The revolutionary marketplace, in transition from royal domain to national property and from corporate privilege to protocapitalist “liberty,” formed the locus of the Dames’ collective identity as merchants and as citoyennes. Jarvis’s meticulous analysis of the reconstruction of les Halles and the reorganization of trade establishes that debates over commerce, from hoarding and high prices to market space and taxation, were central to the politics of revolution. Her sleuthing uncovers the Dames’ vigorous involvement in revolutionary negotiations over parasols and patentes, credit and currency reform. The final chapter turns to the patente, an occupational license tax for the self-employed, which altered the Dames’ relationship to citizenship and the state under the Directory between 1796 and 1798. In the wake of the Le Chapelier law, the patente shifted the organizational nexus of the market from corporate bodies to the individual, transforming “occupational labor into intangible personal property” (203). Jarvis reads the Directory’s imposition of the tax on ambulant merchants in 1796 as conferring a form of fiscal citizenship through which the Dames, now considered individual commercial agents, entered a personal contract with the state. “The patente transformed work into a type of property,” which, she asserts, “signified civic independence without gendered foundations.” In formalizing the Dames’ contract with the state as “citizen workers” and taxpayers, the patente “disrupt[ed] the gendered binaries of citizenship” (203). If, in theory, the patente undermined the logic of gendered exclusions from citizenship, as Jarvis argues, in fact, the state’s...

Mothers: The Invisible Instruments of Health Promotion

AbstractIn this article, I focus on two problematic aspects of British health-promotion campaigns regarding feeding children, particularly regarding breastfeeding and obesity. The first of these is that health-promotion campaigns around “lifestyle” issues dehumanize mothers with their imagery or text, stemming from the ongoing undervaluing and objectification of mothers and women. Public health-promotion instrumentalizes mothers as necessary components in achieving its aims, while at the same time undermining their agency as persons and interlocutors by tying “mother” to particular images. This has a double effect: first, it excludes mothers who do not fit the campaign picture of a mother; second, it encloses those who do (even vaguely) fit the picture into an objectified image of motherhood that is defined by and subject to the dominant white, heteropatriarchal gaze. The second problem is that campaigns place unjustified demands on mothers, which stem from a misinterpretation of the maternal duty to benefit. I argue that nutrition-related health concerns regarding children are improperly framed as individual failures of maternal duty, rather than as failures of a system to function correctly. These arguments ultimately support shifting the focus of responsibility for issues around childhood nutrition away from mothers and back toward policymakers.

Women's Antiwar Diplomacy during the Vietnam War Era by Jessica M. Frazier

Reviewed by: Women's Antiwar Diplomacy during the Vietnam War Era by Jessica M. Frazier Frances P. Martin (bio) Women's Antiwar Diplomacy during the Vietnam War Era. By Jessica M. Frazier. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. 236. $80.00 cloth; $29.95 paper; $19.99 ebook) As the title suggests, Jessica Frazier's book Women's Antiwar Diplomacy [End Page 139] during the Vietnam War Era examines the role of women in antiwar diplomacy and activism during the Vietnam War. The main crux of Frazier's argument asserts the relationship between the American and Vietnamese women was not U.S. cultural imperialism, but rather a genuine collaborative relationship where each side actively worked to forward their own goals and agenda. Spanning from 1965 to 1978 Frazier documents the collaborative anti-war efforts of Vietnamese and American women and how the nature of the relationships forged by these groups changed over the course of the war as the nature of the Vietnam War also changed. However, while the war provides the context for her primary argument, the women's anti-war activism frames a broader discussion of the role identity and imperialism played in activism during the 1960s and 1970s. Frazier breaks the war into six sections, allowing her to focus on particular issues during each phase. First, Frazier looks at mothers as experts in 1965 to 1967 by focusing on the burgeoning activism of women's antiwar groups in the United States and Vietnam. Motherhood appears as a continuous theme throughout Frazier's argument. She illustrates how both groups used motherhood and maternal duty as a way to justify fighting against the war or fighting in it. After explaining how alliances formed and connections strengthened through international activism and conferences from 1968 to 1970, Frazier uses chapter three to discuss 1970 and the development of "Third World" feminist networks. The chapter focuses on African American, Chicana, and Asian American women activists and how they drew inspiration from the Vietnamese women in their different fight against sexism, racism, and imperialism. In chapter four she examines the years 1969–1972 and focuses on the struggle among feminist movements worldwide to include war as a feminist issue. Using the International Women's Conference as the backdrop for the discussion of war as a feminist issue Frazier shows that the feminist movement and the antiwar movement were hardly a homogenous group with identical goals and agendas. The last two chapters span from 1970–1978 and focus on the more practical ways that women's [End Page 140] antiwar activism impacted the discussion of the Vietnam War concerning women's rights and the conditions of Prisoners of War, and expose the shifting context of alliances between the activists after the war. Overall, Frazier has a well-developed argument aided by a rich set of case studies. By focusing on the individual's experience, she provides a densely woven analysis that propels her argument forward. Frazier also has extensive bibliography-based sources. Her use of oral histories provided the Vietnamese perspective vital to her central thesis and the incorporation of these interviews strengthened the overall narrative. By giving us a glimpse of the Vietnamese women's view, Frazier solidifies her claim of collaborative and mutually beneficial relations between the American and Vietnamese women. Despite the excellent use of oral histories, Frazier's analysis was from a primarily American or western perspective, which at times sidelined the voices of the Vietnamese women involved in the narrative. However, this does not lessen Frazier's contribution to the historiography. This book challenges previous conventions about the level of women's involvement in the anti-war movement and the type of relationships forged on an international level between Vietnams and American women. Rather than creating yet another imperialistic encounter between the United States and Vietnam, Frazier shows that these women came together to fight the imperialism that American intervention in Vietnam represented. Finally, this book shows the underlying complexities and intersections of identity and activism present in the antiwar movement around the world. [End Page 141] Frances P. Martin FRANCES P. MARTIN is a PhD student at the University of Connecticut. She currently researches...

“I am not a nurse!”: femininity, maternalism, and heritage in A Mind at Peace

ABSTRACTIn Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s novel A Mind at Peace, Nuran plays a central role as the beloved and provides the title for one of the four chapters, yet, much like the female characters in Tanpınar’s other works, receives little critical attention. This article examines Nuran through her femininity, maternalism, and heritage as the representation of a changing cultural and social identity tied to the Ottoman past but focused on the future. While Mümtaz, the male protagonist, inhabits a juvenile or deferred present, Nuran is rooted in the present through her multifaceted female identity and maintains a conflicted connection to the past and to her progeny through her family’s legacy, the “Song in the Mahur Mode.” This discord manifests in Nuran’s maternal duty to protect her daughter Fatma, who also bears the inheritance and emerges as Mümtaz’s main rival for Nuran’s affections. Nuran’s choice to pursue a transgressive relationship within the structure of her familial fate posits a feminine and cyclical alternative to the historical and aesthetic nostalgia of Mümtaz.

Breastfeeding and defeasible duties to benefit

For many women experiencing motherhood for the first time, the message they receive is clear: mothers who do not breastfeed ought to have good reasons not to; bottle feeding by...

Re-considering Johannine Discipleship with the Feminine Image of Jesus: Taking God's Maternal Duty

Re-considering Johannine Discipleship with the Feminine Image of Jesus: Taking God's Maternal Duty

Breastfeeding in the Course of History

Nurturing babies is an issue inextricably bound to all species in nature. In prehistoric times, breastfeeding was the first priority of mothers until later in infancy. In ancient times breastfeeding continued to be of crucial importance, and goddesses of motherhood are presented with naked breasts. Concurrently, for the first time in history, wet nurses appeared in societies as a legal profession to replace mothers when they were unable to feed their children; special utensils for artificial feeding appeared as well. In Ancient Egypt breastfeeding was first priority of mothers until infants reached six months of age and then, cow’s milk was given to children. In Ancient Mesopotamia and Ancient Greece, breastfeeding was of high value and one can find numerous references in mythology. Wet nursing was also widespread in these societies. Nevertheless, great historians and philosophers, such as Aristotle and Plutarch opposed to employing wet nurses, as they strongly believed that breastfeeding was a duty of the mother. In Roman times, wet nursing began to be a choice of the majority of wealthy families. In Israel and China, breastfeeding continued until the age of two years, while in Indies, it stopped at six months, when teething starts. In Islam, breastfeeding had a religious basis and usually lasted for two years and wet nurses were selected by parents with great thoughtfulness. In Byzantine times, the duration of breastfeeding was set at around twenty months. Colostrum was considered unsuitable and for the first days of life honey was given to newborns instead. In Middle Ages, objections against wet nursing reappeared as it was considered that breast milk could transmit physical and psychological characteristics of the woman and that breastfeeding was a maternal duty. In Renaissance, writings on pediatrics strongly argued mother’s breastfeeding. At the end of eighteenth century, new substitutes of feeding infants appeared such as animal milk, pap and panada. In the ensuing years (19 th century) mothers had to work in order to contribute to family income, and for the first time artificial feeding became the first choice. At the outset of this century, the first chemical analysis gave a vast advantage over human milk. Notwithstanding, in the twentieth century, formulas continued to be the first choice as advertising exerted its influence on public opinion. Especially in developed countries, there was a dramatic increase in the use of formulas, as it was considered to be the best nutrition for the infants. As a result, an outbreak of necrotizing enterocolitis occurred with increase in infant mortality. Mothers avoided breastfeeding as they often felt ashamed, as breast is an element of woman’s sexuality. Lately, a strong movement is noticed worldwide attempting to convince societies and healthcare professionals on the innumerable advantages of breastfeeding for the mother, the infants and in the long-term for the health systems.

Stage Mothers: Women, Work, and the Theater, 1660-1830.

Laura Engel and Elaine M. McGirr; eds. Stage Mothers: Women, Work, and the Theater, 1660-1830. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2014. 274 pp. $90.00 USD (hardback). ISBN 7881611486032.Perhaps more remarkable than the fact that pregnant eighteenth-century actresses, even well into their third trimesters, appeared on stage as heroines prepared to sacrifice their lives for their chastity, is the fact that it so often went unremarked. Representational realism seems to have been less important to the audience than affective virtuosity. The carefully selected, richly various, and rewarding essays in Elaine McGirr and Laura Engel's edition not only bring this kind of information about the stage mother into view, but they often shift our angle of vision too.Helen Brooks' lively opening essay, "The Divided Heart of the Actress," reminds us that actresses paid by performance could rarely afford to miss an appearance; more often than not, maternal duty entailed providing for one's family through dramatic labor rather than domestic retreat. Actresses thus sought to turn to their advantage the flying in the face of received wisdom about pregnancy-not to be overstimulated by passion, to avoid crowds, to undertake only light duties-by associating themselves with the maternal devotion they were often required to perform on stage.In their fine, brisk, and stimulating introduction, McGirr and Engel lay out their stall. The book "attempts to analyse the performance and representation of maternity from the Restoration through the Regency periods" on the English stage and "to document the lived experience of both celebrity and supporting actress-mothers" (8). The collection reevaluates and re-values the significance of maternity in the major stage successes of the long eighteenth century. Further, it brings theatre and literary history into productive dialogue by paying attention to the relation between role and player, offering a series of fascinating case studies across the entire range of the period and of private and public theatricals.The book is divided into three parts. The first explores and assesses the success of actresses in exploiting their performance to massage their questionable sexual and reproductive histories. J. D. Phillipson and Elaine McGirr draw attention to the ways in which Anne Oldfield, in the early decades of the century, and Susannah Cibber, in the mid-1740s, vindicated dubious sexual reputations in performances of virtuous mothers that drew attention to their own commitment to their children (Andromache in Ambrose Philips' The Distrest Mother for Oldfield and Constance in her ex father-in-law's Papal Tyranny of King John for Cibber). Ellen Malenas Ledoux comes to the surprising (but surprisingly convincing) conclusion that of the two young mothers acquiring a reputation on the stage in the 1780s, it was Mary Robinson whose public-relations strategy (of charting her maternal devotion in print) was to prove more enduring than Sarah Siddons' practice of promoting her image as tragic queen through visual presentation on stage and in portraits-a practice that was increasingly subject to ridicule as she aged.The second part addresses the significance of mothers in plays and operas, without losing sight of the ways in which those parts are woven into the complex relationships of kinship and friendship within the playhouses. Among the five essays here, Emrys Jones' piece stands out with an insightful re-appraisal not only of Frances Sheridan's significance in the works of her offspring, but also of the apparently uncomplicated mockery of misguided maternal or pseudo-maternal influence in the character of Mrs Malaprop (which Richard Brinsley Sheridan took from his mother's creation, Mrs Tryfort in her A Journey to Bath). Jones points to a "camouflaged, inalienable inheritance" (172) that derives from the mother, closing his fine piece by alerting us to the peculiar appropriateness of Mrs Tryfort's substitution of "progeny" for "prodigy" (173). …

What's Love Got to Do with It? Dynastic Politics and Motherhood in the Letters of Eleonora of Aragon and her Daughters

This article analyses interpretations of motherhood in letters from the duchess of Ferrara, Eleonora d'Aragona, to her daughters, Isabella and Beatrice d'Este. Following the girls’ marriages in 1490 and 1491, the duchess used letters to maintain a close surveillance and authority over them, as well as to offer advice and direction as they established intimacy with their spouses, faced the rigours of childbirth and took on new political responsibilities. In their side of the correspondence, Isabella and Beatrice reveal their anxieties about marriage and transfer to a new environment. The author argues that despite the constraints of writing mainly through secretaries and according to formulaic epistolary conventions, the women communicated effectively, revealing both their struggle to adhere to conventional interpretations of filial and maternal duty and the personal costs borne by them for the sake of their family's dynastic and political survival.

Mulheres que denunciam violência sexual intrafamiliar

O estudo tem por objetivo compreender o papel de mulheres que fazem denúncia de violência sexual, perpetrada por um membro de sua convivência, contra seu filho/a. O trabalho apresenta resultados de entrevistas semiestruturadas realizadas com cinco mães de crianças vítimas de violência sexual intrafamiliar. Utilizou-se a análise de conteúdo de Bardin, dividindo-se os resultados em quatro categorias: (a) susto, culpa, raiva, dúvida são as primeiras reações frente à revelação; (b) a dor da verdade torna-se força para agir; (c) as instâncias de proteção e de garantia de direitos e as expectativas de apoio e resolução; e (d) transformar-se e ir em frente. As motivações para a proteção decorreram do vínculo materno filial fortalecido e do reconhecimento do dever materno de proteger e cuidar. Destacou-se o papel crucial das instituições de proteção e garantia de direitos e concluiu-se que as adversidades e o sofrimento conduziram a mudanças na forma de encarar e perceber as experiências da vida dessas mães.

Причины утраты женственности героиней античных трагедий Медеей и этическая оценка данного явления

The author of the article seeks to reveal the reasons for the loss of femininity by heroines’ suffering from the Medea complex. To this end, the author considers the various developments of the plot featuring a betrayed woman taking revenge on her husband to be found in mythology, Euripides’ tragedies, Jean Marie Lucien Pierre Anouilh’s dramas, Yuri Petrovich Lyubimov’s theatrical performances at the Taganka Theatre. The author demonstrates that the revenge of mythological Medea is extolled and sanctified by Helios. In «Medea» created in a patriarchy-dominated period, Euripides shows a different attitude: his sympathy for the heroine reveals itself in Medea’s monologue, however, his condemnation of children-destruction by Medea is evident through the chorus cues. The image of the heroine is still elevated and stirs up sympathy. Lyubimov theatrical performance is inspired by Euripides’ tragedy, but the director gives a broad hint at the Medea tragedy repeating itself in the contemporary context. Kama Ginkas’ theatrical performances, emphasis is laid on Medea’s villainy, rather than on a feat of love. The author of the article claims that
 the evolution of the interpretation of Medea’s image is in tune with the evolution of cultural values over time. The view of Medea as alien to femininity is related by the author to the dominance of patriarchy and
 Christianity, which the author is agreed with and concludes that currently the image of Medea is to be seen as a negative example which serves to demonstrate that revenge, murder, and lack of maternal duty are incompatible with the concept of femininity. The author proves that the Medea complex identification and its ethics- and aesthetics-informed interpretation are currently of utmost importance.

Tecendo as teias do abandono: além das percepções das mães de bebês prematuros

The scope of this study was to analyze the events involved in preterm infant abandonment by their mothers. A qualitative study was carried out with 12 mothers of preterm infants interned in the NICU of the Federal University of Maranhão - Brazil. The techniques were semi-structured interviews and a focus group performed during internment and in follow-up in the outpatient unit. The sample was defined according to saturation criteria. Content analysis was utilized by thematic scrutiny. The results showed several modes of abandonment in the mothers' life history: abandonment by relatives, social abandonment, and abandonment by the partner. Abandonment by the family was seen in childhood and adolescence as well as in pregnancy, and during infant internment. Another point was the perception of caring as a maternal duty leading to the building of the ideal model that a good mother is loving and does not abandon her offspring. Family, social, and health professional support networks can contribute to maternal empowerment that leads to refraining from abandonment. It was concluded that an abandoned mother might in turn become an abandoning mother, and that, support networks providing attention and protection may turn the history of the abandonment cycle around.

Milk Markets: Technology, the Lactating Body, and New Forms of Consumption

In early chapters of Charles Dickens s 1848 novel; Dombey and Son, Mr. Dombey, a thriving industrialist, is forced to hire a lower-class wet nurse to sustain his family name and the Dombey commercial empire. After the death of his wife, the wet nurse, Polly is the primary source of nourishment and comfort for his only son; to her he states: It is not at all in this bargain that you need become attached to my child, or that my need become attached to you. I don't expect or desire anything of the kind. Quite the reverse. When you go away from here, you will have concluded what is a mere matter of bargain and sale, hiring and letting: and will stay away. The will cease to remember you; and you will cease, if you please to remember the child (14). In the context of this Victorian novel, breast milk is a valuable commodity exchanged for income and for a place within the household. Dickens represents what was a common reality; wet nurses were often women of the lower classes whose own children were relegated to baby farms or hand feeding, while nursing became the means of survival for poor women and for the infants of the more privileged classes. Emphasizing the economic nature of this exchange and the need to keep the wet nurse under his watchful eye, Dombey renames Polly Richards (implying a shift from poor to rich) and views her intimate interactions with the baby in a little glass conservatory adjacent to his dark, masculine study. The novels emphasis upon the regulation and observation of the intimate act of breastfeeding exemplifies how the female breast, and breastfeeding, became increasingly charged and contested in the nineteenth century. Here, the lower-class female body is disciplined as it exchanges breast milk as a commodity for entry into the middle-class household. In this literary depiction, the wet nurse creates anxiety and unease through her class position and her closeness to the infant, and yet she is a necessary inclusion to the household and crucial to the success of the Dombey family future. By the twentieth century the work of wet nursing began to steadily decline as discourses of maternity encouraged breastfeeding as a maternal duty and as scientific and technological innovations produced new artificial formulas and a range of improved bottle-feeding devices. Consequently breastfeeding was imagined either as the natural process of infant feeding and attachment shared between mother and - or as bottle feedings alternative or companion. Either way it was a process more deeply embedded in the science of domestic management that emerged in this period. Left not just in the hands of mothers, the act of breastfeeding was increasingly managed and shaped by a broader reading culture and became a subject of discussion and debate among doctors, scientists, and writers of domestic manuals. A model of efficiency that established how to feed infants, when to do it, and how to perform as an effective nursing mother all became scientifically addressed and managed at this time and continue to be today.1 The issues of boundary crossing and circulation that the nineteenthcentury wet nurse embodied continue in representations of breastfeeding and milk-sharing in early-twenty-first-century culture, but they take on new forms and are shaped by a broad range of forces. In this essay I begin to trace the multiple and shifting representations of breast milk and its disembodiment in contemporary culture, examining how its circulation as a product of the larger economy reveals the contradictory ways that motherhood and maternal care is imagined, managed, and, in some contexts, exploited. Tracing the transformation of breast milk as a commodity in the marketplace, I consider how medical technologies produce new corporate and global models of milk sharing based not upon the intimate relationship of maternal and infant bodies, but instead on scientifically transforming milk into a product to be shared on a much wider scale. …

Maternal Memory and Murder in Early-Seventeenth-Century England

This article argues that the depiction of murderous mothers in three early-seventeenth-century texts both contests and expands earlier notions of motherhood and female power by highlighting the effects of maternal memory. The pamphlet (1616) and broadside (1624) I examine both stress the disruptive potential of the forgetting of maternal duty, while the play, John Ford's Love's Sacrifice (1633), represents three mothers who remember their maternal duties through murder. All of these texts showcase a "new" mother construct where memory is the centerpiece, emphasizing the power of this ambiguous figure who can both create and destroy.

The Legacy of White Supremacy and the Challenge of White Antiracist Mothering

Aanerud's project is to develop an account of white antiracist mothering, using a model of maternal duty to raise antiracist white children. The author sets this project in the context of historic constructions of white mothering in the twentieth century and then contrasts the need for an exploration of white mothers raising white children against the literature of white mothers’ raising children of color and mothers of color raising their own children, Once this distinction is made, Aanerud uses Collins's account of racial ethnic mothering as a springboard into her discussion of antiracist white mothering of white children.

On Mothers, Babies and Bathwater: Distributive Justice, Tort Law and Prenatal Duties

In this article I seek to apply a general claim about tort law - that it should promote as one of its goals a better attainment of distributive justice - to the context of maternal prenatal duty. My argument is that, contrary to common belief among lawyers, the negative burden that a maternal prenatal duty of care would place on potential defendants’ autonomy, although significant, is not a convincing reason in itself to oppose such a duty. Crucial to this argument is the fact that it is the autonomy of women that is limited. Moreover, and somewhat counter-intuitively, I argue that a genuine distributive-egalitarian concern can in fact support the imposition of liability, within the limits of actual insurance coverage, when certain conditions are met, at least according to one understanding of this concern.

Birthweight as a function of maternal duty status and participation in mandatory physical training program

Birthweight as a function of maternal duty status and participation in mandatory physical training program