Price: $39.95
Page Count: 292
Publication Date: January 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77258-213-0
"Absorbing, poignant and profound. This collection begs us to
de-mythologize, de-romantizie and confront with courage the full
complexity of what it means to mother. This is philosophy as aletheia--
pulling back the veil-- and what we see may change philosophies of
mothering forever."
-- Caroline R. Lundquist
Ethics Instructor, University of Oregon
Antidote to romanticizing motherhood, this book shows clearly and in detail why motherhood is an activity fraught with ambivalence, some inherent, much socially constructed. As such, this volume makes a significant contribution to feminist theory and maternity studies, detailing the nature and sources of maternal ambivalence, and showing why raising children raises deep existentialist dilemmas for mothering persons.
-- Maureen Sander-Staudt
Southwest Minnesota State University
Associate Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies
Introduction Tanya Cassidy and Sarah LaChance Adams
Chapter 1 Sagashus T. Levingston – Ambivalent Intersections
Chapter 2 Joan Woolfrey – The Virtue of Ambivalence to Maternity
Section I: Ambivalence in Pregnancy and Childbirth
Chapter 3 Amanda Roth – What is Pregnancy Ambivalence? Is it Maternal Ambivalence?
Chapter 4 Aleksandra Staneva – The Unspeakables: Exploring Maternal Ambivalence through the Experience of Depression and Anxiety during Pregnancy
Chapter 5 Sara Cohen Shabot – On Ambivalence and Giving Birth: Reflecting on Labour through Beauvoir’s Erotic
Chapter 6 Bertha Alvarez Manninen – A Healthy Baby is not All that Matters: Exploring my Ambivalence after a Cesarean Section
Section II: Seeking Perfection, Finding Despair
Chapter 7 Patricia MacLaughlin and Gwen Scarborough – “I’m So Tired”: The Labour of Care, Infant Sleep Management and Maternal Ambivalence
Chapter 8 Claire Steele LeBeau – Maternal Guilt and the First-Time Mother
Chapter 9 Talia Welsch – Meta-Helicopter Parenting: Ambivalence in a Neoliberal World
Chapter 10 Kate Parsons – Sustainable Ambivalence
Chapter 11 Joan Garvan – Ambivalence and Identification: Avenues for Reification or Change
Section III: Mothering in Context
Chapter 12 Mel Freitag – Unpacking Monomaternalism within a Queer Motherhood Framework
Chapter 13 Sophia Brock – Mothering Children with Disabilities: Navigating Choice and Obligations
Chapter 14 Susan Hogan – Unnatural Women: Reflections on Discourses of Child Murder and Selective Mortal Neglect
Chapter 15 Myriam Denov – “Mother, Is this our home?” Mothering in the Context of the Lord’s Resistance Army Captivity
Sarah LaChance Adams is associate professor of philosophy at University of Wisconsin Superior. She is author of Mad Mothers, Bad Mothers, and What a “Good” Mother Would Do: The Ethics of Ambivalence. She is co-editor of Coming to Life: Philosophies of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Mothering; and New Philosophies of Sex and Love: Thinking through Desire. She lives with her family in Duluth, Minnesota.
Tanya Cassidy is a Fulbright-HRB (Irish Health Research Board) Health Impact scholar, an EU Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska Curie Award (MSCA) fellow, a Cochrane Fellow and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan). Recently she took up a lectureship in the School of Nursing and Health Sciences at Dublin City University (DCU).
Susan Hogan is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Derby and a Professorial Fellow of the Institute of Mental Health of the University of Nottingham. She has written extensively on women’s transition to motherhood and experience of psychiatry. Her most recent funded research is The Birth Project (AHRC grant ref. AH/K003364/1).
