Maternal Pasts Feminist Futures

Author : Lynne Huffer
Publisher : Stanford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0804730261
Total Pages : 212 pages
Book Rating : 4.66/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures written by Lynne Huffer and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the relations among nostalgia, gender, and foundational philosophies through a critique of the lost mother as a ground for thinking about sexual difference. More specifically, the author critiques the nostalgic tendencies of feminist theory, arguing that an emancipatory system of thought must move beyond a maternally oriented structure. Through close readings of works by Maurice Blanchot, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Nicole Brossard, the book elucidates the many dimensions of nostalgic paradigms—literary, psychoanalytic, epistemological, ontological, and sociopolitical. This critique ultimately confronts postmodernism, and especially the burgeoning field of performative theory, as an intellectual paradigm that claims to subvert systems of meaning. Analyzing the writings of J. L. Austin, Judith Butler, and Irigaray, the author argues that despite its antinostalgic structure, performative theory provides an inadequate model for understanding the connections among language, identity, and the social bonds that constitute the ethical and political sphere. Asserting, through the example of performative theory, that a critique is not enough, the book examines the possibility of a constructive model that is both non-nostalgic and informed by ethical constraints. One such model is offered through a reading of the Quebecois writer Nicole Brossard, which explores her work in relation to the question of lesbian writing. Demystifying nostalgia, Brossard not only uncovers and subverts the structures through which a concept of origins is produced, but also provides a different, visionary way of thinking about the relationship between subjectivity and language. Finally, the book argues for further feminist work on the relationship between narrative and ethics, a field whose future lies in the elaboration of a bridge between the moral commitments of ethical theory and the fractured realities that find their expression in literary forms.

Author : Noortje Willems
Publisher : Uitgeverij Verloren
ISBN 13 : 9087046510
Total Pages : 176 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Gender and Archiving: Past, Present, Future written by Noortje Willems and published by Uitgeverij Verloren. This book was released on 2017 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This 37th volume of the Yearbook of Women's History focuses on the meaning and potential of archiving for enhancing gender equality and the position of women worldwide. More than just storehouses of knowledge, archives offer new ways for understanding the past, debating the present and creating the future. Focusing on both traditional and non-traditional archival practices, in various parts of the world, the Yearbook of Women’s History explores the meaning of archiving for women and women’s history. Besides investigating the feminist potential of the archive, it also examines questions of erasure and forgetting. While archives may have emancipatory or democratizing potential, practices of discarding equally shape the histories that can be written, and the stories that can be told. The articles in this volume are alternated with descriptions of collections and institutes, and the topics addressed cover a full range of archival theory and practice. This volume has been produced by the editorial board of the Yearbook of Women's History in collaboration with Atria, institute on gender equality and women's history in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Author : Cristina Mazzoni
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780801440359
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.51/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Maternal Impressions written by Cristina Mazzoni and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an unusual combination of reflection, autobiography, theory, and criticism, Cristina Mazzoni looks at childbirth and early maternity from the perspective of an academic mother with three young children. Mazzoni draws upon examples ranging from contemporary advice manuals and novels to the work of turn-of-the-century Italian scientists and women writers, as well as fairy tales, religious texts, psychoanalytic accounts, and feminist theory. Throughout her investigations of the various forces that shape cultural views of pregnancy and childbirth, Mazzoni strives to imagine and deploy maternity as a concept and a reality capable of challenging conventional representations of subjectivity. The questions she addresses dwell on relationship and interdependence, the inseparability of the personal and the political, and the connections and interactions between bodies and power. Maternal Impressions is far more than a book of literary criticism and theory. It reveals the multiple bonds and continuities between the contradictory ways in which pregnancy and childbirth were represented a century ago and the manner in which they still haunt feminist experience today. In her conclusion, Mazzoni points toward a possible ethics of maternity.

Author : Janet Beizer
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 0801457122
Total Pages : 585 pages
Book Rating : 4.28/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Thinking through the Mothers written by Janet Beizer and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 585 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If questions of subjectivity and identification are at stake in all biographical writing, they are particularly trenchant for contemporary women biographers of women. Often, their efforts to exhume buried lives in hope of finding spiritual foremothers awaken maternal phantoms that must be embraced or confronted. Do women writing in fact have any greater access to their own mothers' lives than to the lives of other women whose stories have been swept away like dust in the debris of the past? In Thinking through the Mothers, Janet Beizer surveys modern women's biographies and contemplates alternatives to an approach based in lineage and the form of thought that emphasizes the line, the path, hierarchy, unity, resemblance, reflection, and the aesthetic-mimesis-that depends on these ideas. Through close readings of memoirs and fictions about mothers, Beizer explores how biographers of the women who came before rehearse and rewrite relationships to their own mothers biographically as they seek to appropriate the past in a hybrid genre she calls "bio-autography." Thinking through the Mothers features the work of George Sand and Colette and spans such varied figures as Gustave Flaubert, Julian Barnes, Louise Colet, Eunice Lipton, Vladimir Nabokov, Huguette Bouchardeau, and Christa Wolf. Beizer seeks an alternative to women's "salvation biography" or "resurrection biography" that might resist nostalgia, be attentive to silence, and reinvent the means to represent the lives of precursors without appropriating traditional models of genealogy.

Author : Stacy Alaimo
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501720465
Total Pages : 239 pages
Book Rating : 4.68/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Undomesticated Ground written by Stacy Alaimo and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-24 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From "Mother Earth" to "Mother Nature," women have for centuries been associated with nature. Feminists, troubled by the way in which such representations show women controlled by powerful natural forces and confined to domestic space, have sought to distance themselves from nature. In Undomesticated Ground, Stacy Alaimo issues a bold call to reclaim nature as feminist space. Her analysis of a remarkable range of feminist writings—as well as of popular journalism, visual arts, television, and film—powerfully demonstrates that nature has been and continues to be an essential concept for feminist theory and practice.Alaimo urges feminist theorists to rethink the concept of nature by probing the vastly different meanings that it carries. She discusses its significance for Americans engaged in social and political struggles from, for example, the "Indian Wars" of the early nineteenth century, to the birth control movement in the 1920s, to contemporary battles against racism and heterosexism. Reading works by Catherine Sedgwick, Mary Austin, Emma Goldman, Nella Larson, Donna Haraway, Toni Morrison, and others, Alaimo finds that some of these writers strategically invoke nature for feminist purposes while others cast nature as a postmodern agent of resistance in the service of both environmentalism and the women's movement.By examining the importance of nature within literary and political texts, this book greatly expands the parameters of the nature writing genre and establishes nature as a crucial site for the cultural work of feminism.

Author : Miléna Santoro
Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN 13 : 9780773524873
Total Pages : 372 pages
Book Rating : 4.78/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Mothers of Invention written by Miléna Santoro and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2002 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mothers of Invention draws together innovative works of fiction written by French and Quebec feminists in the mid-1970s. Through an analysis of the strategies adopted by Hlne Cixous, Madeleine Gagnon, Nicole Brossard, and Jeanne Hyvrard as they rework maternal and (pro)creative metaphors and play with language and conventions of genre, Milna Santoro identifies a transatlantic community of women writers who share a subversive aesthetic that participates in, even as it transforms, the tradition of the avant-garde in twentieth-century literature. Santoro elucidates notoriously difficult works by the four "mothers of invention" studied - Cixous and Hyvrard from France, and Gagnon and Brossard from Quebec - showing how the rethinking of images associated with femininity and motherhood, a disruptive approach to language, and a subversive relation to novelistic conventions characterize these writers' search for a writing that will best express women's desires and dreams. Mothers of Invention situates such ideologically motivated textual practices within the avant-garde tradition, even as it suggests how women's experimental writings collectively transform our understanding of that tradition. Santoro makes clear the shared ethical and aesthetic commitments that nourished a transatlantic community whose contribution to mainstream literature and cultural productions, including postmodernism, is still being felt today.

Author : Alison Sharrock
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
ISBN 13 : 1487532032
Total Pages : 395 pages
Book Rating : 4.31/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Maternal Conceptions in Classical Literature and Philosophy written by Alison Sharrock and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2020-01-29 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unlike many studies of the family in the ancient world, this volume presents readings of mothers in classical literature, including philosophical and epigraphic writing as well as poetic texts. Rather than relying on a male viewpoint, the essays offer a female perspective on the lifecycle of motherhood. Although almost all ancient authors are men, this book nevertheless aims to carefully unpack the role of the mother – not as projected by the son or other male relations, but from a woman’s own experiences – in order to better understand how they perceived themselves and their families. Because the primary interest is in the mothers themselves, rather than the authors of the texts in which they appear, the work is organized according to the lifecycle of motherhood instead of the traditional structure of the chronology of male authors. The chronology of the male authors ranges from classical Greece to late antiquity, while the motherly lifecycle ranges from pre-conception to the commemoration of offspring who have died before their mothers.

Author : Aimée Boutin
Publisher : University of Delaware Press
ISBN 13 : 9780874137279
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.76/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Maternal Echoes written by Aimée Boutin and published by University of Delaware Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Maternal Echoes' examines maternal imagery in the poetry of two French Romantic poets, the increasingly popular Desbordes-Valmore and the critically marginalized Lamartine. Drawing on psychoanalytic theories on the maternal voice as well as feminist criticism, the book argues that both poets find a voice of their own by echoing their mother's voice.

Author : Andrea O'Reilly
Publisher : Canadian Scholars’ Press
ISBN 13 : 0889614547
Total Pages : 318 pages
Book Rating : 4.43/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Motherhood written by Andrea O'Reilly and published by Canadian Scholars’ Press. This book was released on 2005-08-25 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In feminism, the institution of mothering/motherhood has been a highly contested area in how it relates to the oppression of women. As Adrienne Rich articulated in her classic 1976 book Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, although motherhood as an institution is a male-defined site of oppression, women's own experiences of mothering can nonetheless be a source of power. This volume examines four locations wherin motherhood is simultaneously experienced as a site of oppression and of power: emodiment, representation, practice, and separation. Motherhood: Power and Oppression includes psychological, historical, sociological, literary, and cultural approaches to inquiry and a wide range of disciplinary perspectives — qualitative, quantitative, corporeal, legal, religious, fictional, mythological, dramatic and action research. This rich collection not only covers a wide range of subject matter but also illustrates ways of doing feminist research and practice.

Author : Marjorie Lehman
Publisher : Liverpool University Press
ISBN 13 : 1786948532
Total Pages : 415 pages
Book Rating : 4.33/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Mothers in the Jewish Cultural Imagination written by Marjorie Lehman and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-01 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most Jews will feel intimately familiar with and attached to the figure of the ‘Jewish mother’, yet few have questioned representations of mothers and motherhood in Jewish culture. This volume aims to fill this gap by bringing to the fore the vast network of symbols and images which Jews have associated with mothers from the Bible to the modern period. It demonstrates the complex ways in which the Jewish mother has been used to construct and frame Jewish religion and culture.