Representations of Motherhood

ISBN: 0300068638

Author: Bassin, Donna

Condition: New

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.ContentsIntroduction Donna Bassin, Margaret Honey, and Meryle Mahrer KaplanPart I: The Acknowledgment and Appropriation of Maternal WorkThinking Mothers/Conceiving Birth Sara RuddickFictions of Home Jane LazarreShifting the Center: Race, Class, and Feminist Theorizing about Motherhood Patricia Hill CollinsThe Mothers of the Disappeared: Passion and Protest in Maternal Action Jean Bethke ElshtainMaternity and Rememory in Toni Morrisons Beloved Marianne HirschPart II: The Paradoxical Nature of the Maternal PositionBeing a Mother and Being a Psychoanalyst: Two Impossible Professions Janine Chasseguet-SmirgelThe Omnipotent Mother: A Psychoanalytic Study of Fantasy and Reality Jessica BenjaminMothering, Hate, and Winnicott Elsa FirstMaternal Subjectivity in the Culture of Nostalgia: Mourning and Memory Donna BassinRosalind: A Family Romance Myra GoldbergPart III: The Cultural Construction and Reconstruction of the Maternal ImageImages of the Maternal: An Interview with Barbara Kruger Therese LichtensteinThe Power of "Positive" Diagnosis: Medical and Maternal Discourses on Amniocentesis Rayna RappThe Maternal Voice in the Technological Universe Margaret HoneyTaking the Nature Out of Mother Adria SchwartzSex, Work, and Motherhood: Maternal Subjectivity in Recent Visual Culture E. Ann KaplanPlaying and Motherhood; or, How to Get the Most Out of the Avant-Garde Susan Rubin Suleiman