Price: $34.95
Page Count: 260
Publication Date: October 2018
ISBN: 978-1-77258-171-3
The maternal body is a site of contested dynamics of power, identity, experience, autonomy, occupation, and control. Representations of the maternal body can mis/represent the childbearing and mothering form variously, often as monstrous, idealized, limited, scrutinized, or occupied, whilst dominant discourses limit motherhood through social devaluation. The maternal body has long been a hypervisible artifact: at once bracketed out in the interest of elevating the contributions of sperm-carriers or fetal status; and regarded with hostility and suspicion as out of control. Such arguments are deployed to justify surveillance mechanisms, medical scrutiny, and expectation of self-discipline.
This volume helps to develop a more critical understanding of what it means to be an embodied mother. The materiality of maternity and its centrality to family and social life remains too often viewed as a ‘fringe’ subject, the province of feminists, activists, hysterical women. For too long, the maternal body has been subject to ‘expert’ advice, guidance, censure, and control. Those of us maternal bodies are at risk of being commodified and diminished, having our bodily realities reduced to mechanistic functions and our lived experience disregarded. From art to medical surveillance, from genetics to radioactivity, goddess to breastfeeding, poetry to Indigenous community, dance to body size, the critical eye of the academic and the lived experience of the mother bring into being in this work a body of understanding, of expression, of knowledge and the power and authority of the lived experience, through and about the embodied mother. This critical-creative work encompasses new insights, new research, and redeveloped perspectives which combine the personal with the pervasive and point to new meaning-making in critical motherhood studies via the medium of the maternal body.
“This complex book thoughtfully explores the nuances of women’s relationships to their bodies and bodies’ relationships, in turn, to their contexts and environments. A must-read for anyone who seeks to make sense of the intersections of emotion, embodiment and critical feminist thought.” May Friedman, Associate Professor, School of Social Work, Ryerson University
“This collection of works is an example of how childbearing these days is receiving the scholarly attention it requires. It brings together fascinating topics and fresh perspectives from across disciplines and theoretical and methodological approaches.” Sallie Han, SUNY Oneonta, author of Pregnancy in Practice: Expectation and Experience in the Contemporary United States and co-editor of The Anthropology of the Fetus: Biology, Culture, and Society.
Foreword
Alys Einion
Introduction
Alys Einion and Jen Rinaldi
Section One:
Monitoring the Maternal Body for Failure
Chapter One
Maternal Surveillance, Maternal Control: The Paradox of the Childbearing Body Alys Einion
Chapter Two
Dangerous Bodies: Imagining, Monitoring, and Managing Fatness during Pregnancy Megan Davidson and Sarah Lewin
Chapter Three
“Consideration of the Unborn Child”: Advance Directives and Pregnancy Exclusion Laws Claire Marguerite Leonard Horn
Chapter Four
Manufacturing the Mother: Technical Appropriations of Birth in Ancient Greek Thought
Jessica Elbert Decker
Section Two:
Situating the Maternal Body in the World
Chapter Five
Seeding the Future: Maternal Microbiome as Maternal Embodiment
Rebecca Howes-Mischel
Chapter Six
The Temporality of Maternal Embodiment and the Creative Process: Project Transit Spaces Ruchika Wason Singh
Chapter Seven
Embodied Governance: Community Health, Indigenous Self-Determination, and Birth Practices
Erynne M. Gilpin and Sarah Marie Wiebe
Chapter Eight
Indeterminate Life: Dealing with Radioactive Contamination as a Voluntary Evacuee Mother Maxime Polleri
Section Three:
(Re)Imaging and Reclaiming the Maternal Body as a Site and Source of Power
Chapter Nine
The Limitations and Possibilities of Genetic Imagery
Jen Rinaldi
Chapter Ten
Feeding the World: Reconsidering the Multibreasted Body of Artemis Ephesia
Carla Ionescu
Chapter Eleven
“I’m MY Breastfeeding Expert:” How First-Time Mothers Reclaimed their Power through Breastfeeding
Catherine Ma
Chapter Twelve
Muriel Rukeyser: “In the Body’s Ghetto”
Laura Major
Chapter Thirteen
Freedom to Labour—A Case Study on Childbirth Education and the Creation of Medical Choreographies
Katie Nicole Stahl-Kovell
Notes on Contributors
*Cover image “Morgan’s Birth” 40”X 30 “ Oil on Canvas self-portrait © 2001 Karen Walasek, MFA
Dr. Alys Einion is Associate Professor of Midwifery and Reproductive Health at Swansea University, Wales, UK. She gained her PhD from Aberystwyth University, studying women’s narratives, the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction and writing sexual violence. She is a prolific writer and an equality activist. She is currently working with narrative representations of pregnancy and childbirth, hypnobirthing and midwifery identity and self-storying. She is also a novelist.
Dr. Jen Rinaldi is an Assistant Professor in the Legal Studies program at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology. She earned a Doctoral degree in Critical Disability Studies at York University, where she researched how disability diagnostic technologies affect reproductive decision-making. Currently she engages with narrative and arts-based methodologies to deconstruct eating disorder recovery, and to story traumatic histories of institutionalization.
