Representations of Motherhood - Softcover

Bassin, Donna

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0300068638 ISBN 13: 9780300068634

Publisher: Yale University Press, 1996

Synopsis

For many years mothers have been viewed in terms of their impact on children rather than as people with needs, feelings, and interests―subjects in their own right. This book explores the maternal experience from the mother's point of view. It questions a society that has devalued and sentimentalized motherhood, presents images of generative and creative women who are also mothers, discusses the complex psychological experience of having and being a mother, and examines how representations of mothers in art, film, literature, the social and behavioral sciences, and historical writing have affected women.

Contents
Introduction Donna Bassin, Margaret Honey, and Meryle Mahrer Kaplan
Part I: The Acknowledgment and Appropriation of Maternal Work
Thinking Mothers/Conceiving Birth Sara Ruddick
Fictions of Home Jane Lazarre
Shifting the Center: Race, Class, and Feminist Theorizing about Motherhood Patricia Hill Collins
The Mothers of the Disappeared: Passion and Protest in Maternal Action Jean Bethke Elshtain
Maternity and Rememory in Toni Morrison’s Beloved Marianne Hirsch

Part II: The Paradoxical Nature of the Maternal Position
Being a Mother and Being a Psychoanalyst: Two Impossible Professions Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel
The Omnipotent Mother: A Psychoanalytic Study of Fantasy and Reality Jessica Benjamin
Mothering, Hate, and Winnicott Elsa First
Maternal Subjectivity in the Culture of Nostalgia: Mourning and Memory Donna Bassin
Rosalind: A Family Romance Myra Goldberg

Part III: The Cultural Construction and Reconstruction of the Maternal Image
Images of the Maternal: An Interview with Barbara Kruger Therese Lichtenstein
The Power of "Positive" Diagnosis: Medical and Maternal Discourses on Amniocentesis Rayna Rapp
The Maternal Voice in the Technological Universe Margaret Honey
Taking the Nature Out of Mother Adria Schwartz
Sex, Work, and Motherhood: Maternal Subjectivity in Recent Visual Culture E. Ann Kaplan
Playing and Motherhood; or, How to Get the Most Out of the Avant-Garde Susan Rubin Suleiman

About this title

From the Back Cover

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0300068638
• ISBN 13: 9780300068634
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 294