Maternal Embodiment Research Articles

"As Long as I Got a Breath in My Body": Risk and Resistance in Black Maternal Embodiment.

"Mothering while black" in Cleveland, Ohio is a radical act. This highly segregated, highly unequal urban environment is replete with the chronic stressors that degrade well-being and diminish survival for Black mothers and their infants; specifically, a maternal mortality rate two and a half times that of their white counterparts and an infant mortality rate nearly three times that of infants born to white mothers. In the midst of such tragedy and disadvantage, Black mothers strive to love and care for their children in ways that mitigate the toxicity of structural racism. The seventeen pregnant and postpartum Black women in this ethnographic study describe transformational experiences with what we label "betterment:" whereby they center their children's perspective and needs, reconsider their social networks, and focus on the future with an unflinching understanding of the constraints of structural racism. Locating betterment alongside other examples of maternal embodiment and through the rich theoretical lens of Black feminist scholars these participant narratives suggest that the toxic effects of racism and the means to resist them are embodied by Black mothers. A nuanced understanding of Black motherhood disrupts public discourses of blame and responsibility that obscure our collective duty to dismantle structural racism.

“I Needed to Become a Mother”: Poetic Representations of Maternal Embodiment, Autonomy, and Birth Trauma

While poetic inquiry has been used to explore many aspects of motherhood, there has been less attention given to pregnant, birthing, and immediately postpartum/fourth trimester embodiment. Here, we utilize poetry to explore a topic that is understudied and embodied experiences in the transition from pregnancy to early motherhood. The poems we present in this article are part of a larger project exploring experiences of embodied transition into motherhood. In the context of this larger project, 14 women were interviewed about their experiences of pregnancy, birth, and postpartum. In order to maintain focus on the embodied transition to new motherhood, only participants within 6 months of their first birth at the time of the interview are included in this article. The full data set was analyzed using a feminist-informed qualitative method centered on voice (The Listening Guide), and the poems we present here are derived from the second listening, which focuses on participants’ use of “I” in their narratives.

Bearing Witness? The Question of Foetal Personhood in Response to Pregnancy Loss

ABSTRACTIn this article, I explore the category of foetal personhood recently considered by the Parliament of New South Wales in response to pregnancy loss and trauma. My aim is to provide a feminist analysis of the way that responsibility is tendered by the State, by the social body and by individual subjects for an experience of loss that is specific to sexual difference. Informed by Emmanuel Levinas’ idea of the ethical responsibility the subject has to preserve the other’s alterity, I argue that foetal personhood legislation is ultimately an irresponsible form of testimony insofar as it collapses the other into the same. Luce Irigaray’s work on sexual difference and the self-centred logic of a symbolic economy implicitly figured through the male body is also central to this discussion, alongside other feminist analyses of gendered and maternal embodiment. Locating foetal personhood within a concern for grievability and considering the question of whether some bodies are more publicly grievable than others, I conclude that foetal personhood ultimately refuses to witness the other in her difference.

Choreographing pumping: remaking the ‘ideal’ worker through maternal embodiment in the workplace

The negotiation of employed mothers’ identities as mothers and workers has often been theorized through separation, where women perform their maternal and professional identities differently and distinctly in the home and workplace. However, milk expression in the workplace, as a form of maternal embodiment at work, challenges this separation and the ‘ideal’ worker dedicated entirely to the goals and desires of the firm. This study analyzes how mother-workers negotiate milk expression to suggest that identity practice in the workplace is a choreography between co-workers and supervisors that have the potential to produce hybrid subjectivities outside of the logic of the ‘ideal’ worker or the separation of spheres. Critical moments of performance occur in the movement between spaces within the workplace when maternal and professional work occur simultaneously or maternal embodiment becomes visible to co-workers and supervisors. This paper extends the conversation about gendered organizations to suggest that working mothers are already engaging in the production of hybrid subjectivities in the workplace that have the potential to remake the ‘ideal’ worker.

Misshapen motherhood: Placing breastfeeding distress

In this article, my general aim is to give place to the experiences of breastfeeding distress which emerged during narrative research with mothers in Australia. I suggest that breastfeeding distress must be read not only in terms of the specific socio-spatial landscape through which it takes hold but also in terms of the lived and often non-compliant landscape of the body itself. Informed by accounts of the dominant context of idealized or exclusive motherhood in nations such as Australia, the UK and USA, and drawing on conceptual work concerned with connecting the cultural and corporeal through thinking about place, I explore two instances of breastfeeding distress: pain and inauthenticity. In both of these contexts women battle with the shameful fallout of being unable to perform what Rebecca Kukla describes as ‘proximate mothering’, exemplified in the figure of the breastfeeding mother exclusively able to latch her baby directly to her breasts. As I discuss, women's experiences of extreme pain during breastfeeding and their use of alternative ‘inauthentic’ modes of feeding (such as bottled pumped breastmilk or formula) shatter their expectations of living the ideal of extended maternal embodiment. Also emerging through these distressing experiences, however, is a potentially resilient awareness of the inherently misshapen nature of motherhood which always overflows its idealized state.

Always different?: exploring the monstrous-feminine and maternal embodiment in organisation

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to problematise the notion of woman-as-monster and draws together a conceptual analysis of the monstrous-feminine and its relation to maternal and monstrous bodies including its implications for equality and inclusion in the workplace.Design/methodology/approach– Whilst exploring how female monsters are inextricably tied to their sexual difference, the author draws on social and psychoanalytic perspectives to suggest how such monstrosity is expressed through ambivalence to the maternal. The author analyses two “faces” of the monstrous-feminine in particular: the archaic mother and the monstrous womb (Creed, 1993) and develop this discussion in relation to the potential for a feminist monstrous politics of organisation.Findings– First, the author exposes the basis on which the monstrous-feminine articulates and disarticulates femininity, that is to say, how a feminist analysis of monsters may enable but also foreclose a positive articulation of disruption, disorder and disorganisation central to the conceptualisation of monsters. This is done through a reading of the maternal-feminine and literature on motherhood in organisation studies. Second, the author locates the monstrous-feminine in the body and explores how maternal bodies are constructed and experienced as monstrous as they disrupt the self/other relationship. This analysis suggests that embodying the monster comes with risks and that different configurations of the monstrous maternal are necessary for equality and inclusion in the workplace.Originality/value– The paper identifies and contributes to growing research on the ambivalence of monsters and expands a neglected area of the feminine and maternal aspects of these relationships and what this means for workplace relations.

More Work for Mother

Environmental chemicals (e.g., lead, pesticides, flame retardants) accumulate in all human bodies and have the potential to affect the health of men and women, adults, and children. This article advances “precautionary consumption”—the effort to mediate personal exposure to environmental chemicals through vigilant consumption—as a new empirical site for understanding the intersections between maternal embodiment and contemporary motherhood as a consumer project. Using in-depth interviews, I explore how a group of 25 mothers employ precautionary consumption to mediate their children’s exposure to chemicals found in food, consumer products, and the home. Most of the mothers in the study situate their children’s chemical “burdens” within their own bodies and undertake the labor of precautionary consumption as part of a larger and commodity-based motherhood project. In actively expanding the sphere of responsible motherhood to include managing children’s body burdens, these mothers navigate multiple and overlapping contexts that hold women accountable for children’s futures and value the agency of the proactive consumer. Yet, as the sphere of responsible mothering expands, women without financial resources, time, and family stability are pushed to the margins of normative motherhood.

Taste My Sorrow

For many years there has been intense feminist discussion surrounding western discomfort with pregnant and maternal embodiment. Thinking through the complexities of the pregnant subject as a site for interrogating the ethics and aesthetics of disaster, monstrosity and horror, theorists have celebrated how the unstable spatiality and temporality of pregnant embodiment exceeds regulatory and social norms. Arguing against this tendency for abjection, others have deliberately approach the specificity of maternal subjectivity from a position that engages with the generative, surprising and unexpected in order to counteract a discourse they believe is mired in loss, murder and melancholy. However, despite both these positions' proclaimed interest in embodied specificity, very little consideration is given to articulating the phenomenological differences between the pregnant body and the maternal body. More often than not, the pregnant body and the maternal body are seen as interchangeable terms, revealing a narrative that conflates one ontological being with another.Starting from the premise that there is a distinct difference between pregnant and maternal bodies, this article investigates the affective quandary faced when pregnant and maternal norms are ruptured due to pregnancy loss. Performing the catastrophic unspeakableness of my own experience of stillbirth, this paper takes as its subject Taste My Sorrow - my ongoing series of video, performance and sugar-based works that materially folds and refolds grief, anger, shame, tragedy and horror into sensorially complex forms. Performing a visual and textual elegy for a longed-for dead child, this I sample from my experience stillbirth to ethically and aesthetically explore the catastrophic assemblage of becoming maternal loss.

Embody

Embody

For My Own Pleasure and Delight

For My Own Pleasure and Delight

‘A HATRED SO INTENSE…’ We Need to Talk about Kevin, Postfeminism and Women’s Cinema

This article explores Lynne Ramsay’s 2011 film, We Need to Talk about Kevin, in the context of what has been called the ‘new momism’, and in the light of key feminist debates about maternal representation, matriarchal genealogy, feminist cultural production, and classical and contemporary melodrama. The ‘new momism’, critics have argued, constitutes a postfeminist return to the idealized image of domestic femininity that dominated 1950s America. The difference is that intensive mothering is now seen to be the liberated woman’s enlightened choice, a claim that serves to mask the continued centrality of a gender dualism that determines both our institutional structures and our public fantasies. Arguing that Ramsay’s film should be seen as part of a feminist tradition of filmmaking which subjects to critical reappraisal both these public fantasies and the form of the maternal melodrama in which they are commonly embodied, the article analyses in detail the film’s exploration of issues of female identity, agency and control. Unlike her predecessors, it argues, Ramsay invites us to inhabit the fractured subjectivity, hate, and sense of guilt of the mother in this exploration. Although there is, as Ramsay has commented, no easy ‘redemption’ at the end of the film, its ending points us beyond the twin fantasies of postfeminist maternal masochism and unproblematic feminist agency and towards the possibility of a subjectivity which might accept rather than deny the uncontrollable messiness of maternal embodiment.

Things (Not) to Do with Breasts in Public: Maternal Embodiment and the Biocultural Politics of Infant Feeding

This article offers a biocultural analysis of public representations of breastfeeding, identifying underlying social conflicts that infant feeding controversies mask. If the traditional biocultural approach to breastfeeding emphasizes a need to take account of biological facts from within an evolutionary perspective, this version attends to biological and cultural narratives of lactation as constructions of maternity that together produce diverse rhetorical and material results. Analyzing breastfeeding from this kind of perspective brings attention to social norms of male embodiment, the role of technology in mediating social anxieties about mother's bodies, and the ambivalent cultural impacts of the medicalization of infant feeding. The analysis focuses on three different representational domains: television programs and other mass media forms, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2004 National Breastfeeding Promotion Campaign, and feminist scholarship and activism addressing breastfeeding. In each domain, the same controversies circulate—for example, the physical difficulties of breastfeeding, whether breastfeeding in public is appropriate, how much breastfeeding contributes to health, or whether breastfeeding necessitates a technological apparatus to insure success. These debates really concern maternal responsibility and sexuality: the "problem of breastfeeding" is really another problem, namely the one initiated by women's attempts to enter into public life as women, with all the attendant difficulties of asserting equality and difference simultaneously and of challenging reigning public norms about women's proper place.

Contamination and Contagion: Environmental Toxins, HIV/AIDS, and the Problem of the Maternal Body

Contemporary global health crises that involve mothers necessarily invoke the varied cultural problematics of maternal embodiment. Examining breastfeeding in light of current concerns about maternal contagion and contamination, with special attention to HIV and environmental toxins, allows us to consider how ambivalence toward maternal embodiment affects the ways we address these health crises within which mothers figure so significantly.

Contamination and Contagion: Environmental Toxins, HIV/AIDS, and the Problem of the Maternal Body

Contemporary global health crises that involve mothers necessarily invoke the varied cultural problematics of maternal embodiment. Examining breastfeeding in light of current concerns about maternal contagion and contamination, with special attention to HIV and environmental toxins, allows us to consider how ambivalence toward maternal embodiment affects the ways we address these health crises within which mothers figure so significantly.

Prima gravida

Over the past decade, representations of pregnant embodiment, foetal imagery and the maternal body have become the subject of intense feminist investigation across fields as diverse as philosophy, science and cultural studies. This body of work represents a sustained intervention in the politics of reproduction and the politics of representation that builds on earlier feminist discourses on motherhood. Within this article, I want to address the limits of, and ruptures in, the representation of the maternal body in relation to particular examples of visual art practice. The article focuses on four pregnant figurations that seem to constitute certain limit points in the representation of maternal embodiment: the `phantom' pregnant body; the elderly prima gravida; the pregnant woman with disabilities; and young women undergoing abortion . My argument is that, in these particular visual texts, `being pregnant' is represented as an unnatural rather than a natural state and as a cultural rupturing of feminine and maternal norms. This seems to offer a useful starting point from which to interrogate the relations between prevailing discourses around the maternal subject and the unstable subject of pregnancy.

The ethics of the birth plan in childbirth management practices

This article is an exploration of the ways in which maternal subjectivity is negotiated and defined in the context of the act or process of giving birth. As such, it is offered as a contribution to and discussion of recent feminist evaluation of childbirth management systems. Written from the partial perspective of my own experiences of pregnant and maternal embodiment, the article considers whether the ethic of the birth plan is a satisfactory representation of consumer needs and participation in contemporary maternity care. By way of a selective personal account of various models of consumer-orientated and woman-centred childbirth management services that exist in Australia and New Zealand, I draw on ideas from feminist theories of corporeality and the dialogical tradition of social thought in order to rethink the ethical encounter between the labouring woman or consumer and her care provider or practitioner.